Remote viewing is a fancy name for telepathy or clairvoyance, the alleged psychic ability to perceive places, persons, and actions that are not within the range of the senses. If a "beacon" is used to send psychic images, it is said to be telepathy. If no beacon is used, then it is clairvoyance. The term seems to have been invented by physicists Dr. Russell Targ and physicist/scientologist Dr. Harold Puthoff to describe their work with alleged psychics for the U.S. government in a project known as Stargate.
Remote viewing is a kind of psychic dowsing. Instead of a twig or other device, one uses psychic power alone to dowse the entire galaxy, if need be, for whatever one wants: oil, mountains on Jupiter, a lost child, a buried body, a hostage site thousands of miles away, a secret meeting inside the Pentagon or the Kremlin, etc.
Ingo Swann and Harold Sherman claim to have done remote viewing of Mercury and Jupiter. Targ and Puthoff reported that their remote viewing compared favorably to the findings of the Mariner 10 and Pioneer 10 research spacecraft. Isaac Asimov did a similar comparison and found that 46% of the observation claims of the astral travelers were wrong. Also, only one out of 65 claims made by the remote viewers was a fact that either was not obvious or not obtainable from reference books (Randi 1982).
Targ and Puthoff, whom Randi refers to as the Laurel and Hardy of psi research, were not put off by the fact that Swann claimed he saw a 30,000 ft. mountain range on Jupiter on his astral voyage when there is no such thing. It is hard to imagine why anyone would have faith in such claims. If I told you that I had been to your home town and had seen a 30,000 ft. high mountain there, and you knew there was no such mountain, would you think I had really visited your town even if I correctly pointed out that there is a river nearby and it sometimes floods? Swann, in a lovely ad hoc hypothesis, now claims that astral travel is so fast that he probably wasn't seeing Jupiter but another planet in another solar system! There really is a big mountain out there on some planet in some solar system in some galaxy.
The CIA and the U.S. Army thought enough of remote viewing to spend millions of taxpayers' dollars on "Stargate." The program involved using psychics for such operations as trying to locate Gaddafi of Libya (so our Air Force could drop bombs on him) and the locating of a missing airplane in Africa. The mass media, ever watchful of wasteful government programs, did not exhibit much skepticism regarding remote viewing. Typical is the reporting in the Sacramento area. TV news anchors Alan Frio and Beth Ruyak led their nightly Channel 10 program on November 28, 1995, with a story on "exciting new evidence" that remote viewing really works. The same story had appeared that morning in the Sacramento Bee in an Associated Press article about "Stargate" by Richard Cole. "A particularly talented viewer accurately drew windmills when the sender was at a windmill farm at Altamont Pass," Cole wrote. The "talented viewer" was Joe McMoneagle, a former army psychic spy and part of the Stargate project. Cole based his claim on the testimony of Dr. Jessica Utts, a statistics professor at the University of California, Davis, who was hired by the government to do an assessment of "psychic functioning." Channel 10 interviewed Dr. Utts, who confirmed that there is good reason to believe that Joe McMoneagle does indeed have psychic powers. Utts coauthored several papers with physicist Edwin May, who took over the remote viewing program of Stargate from Puthoff in 1985. So, she was not a disinterested party.
CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said: "The CIA is reviewing available programs regarding parapsychological phenomena, mostly remote viewing, to determine their usefulness to the intelligence community" (Cole 1995). He also notes that the Stargate program was found to be "unpromising" in the 1970s and was turned over to the Defense Department. At one time as many as sixteen psychics worked for the government and the Defense Intelligence Agency made them available to other government departments. One of the psychics, David Morehouse, was recruited when he took a bullet in the head in Jordan and started having visions and vivid nightmares. He's written a book about it (Psychic Warrior) and it is sure to be better received by true believers than Mansfield's disclaimer.
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Nice article! Fwiw, in case it is useful to you:
> Remote viewing is a fancy name for telepathy or clairvoyance, the alleged psychic ability to perceive places, persons, and actions that are not within the range of the senses.
That is true but partial; what differentiates remote viewing from ordinary 'psychic' work is that remote viewing is done within a science protocol which controls for non-psi information, requires factual feedback, etc. among other things. Also, it is clearly in the range of some kind of sense if it exists; the RV protocol (required to officially call something formal RV) ensures that information is not accessible through any "known physiological" senses. There must be something else, if any of it even on occasion is valid. I assume that eventually science will find a way to explain this, if some of its cheerleaders stop name-calling long enough to bother doing science rather than armchair critique.
> If a "beacon" is used to send psychic images, it is said to be telepathy. If no beacon is used, then it is clairvoyance.
That was true a few decades ago. All remote viewing information is now considered to be simply 'anomalous cognition' or 'psi'. Initially remote viewing was done with an individual; then the "outbounder teams" used beacons/receivers, but eventually in the lab they realized that people did just as well as individuals as with an alleged 'sender' so that model was pretty much dropped. Most of the models from psychic functioning in the 1960s-80s are now obsolete. If you want current information you should go somewhere like the Cognitive Sciences Laboratories.
> The term seems to have been invented by physicists Dr. Russell Targ and physicist/scientologist Dr. Harold Puthoff to describe their work with alleged psychics for the U.S. government in a project known as Stargate.
That is incorrect. The term “Remote Viewing” was officially coined in the science laboratory of the American Association for Psychical Research in December 1971, during experiments with researchers Dr. Karlis Osis, Dr. Janet Lee Mitchell, Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, and experimental subject Ingo Swann. Swann and Puthoff (and others) did not work together on the projects that later-led-to the U.S. government funding until years later. Which technically (as trivia) was many, many projects. A selection of them (those not still classified) were grouped together under the umbrella term 'The Stargate Program' retroactively by the CIA. The name was taken from the very last project, STAR GATE, which by the way at the time was long before the famous movie, and like all projects, was actually just two random words strung together.
> Remote viewing is a kind of psychic dowsing. Instead of a twig or other device, one uses psychic power alone to dowse the entire galaxy, if need be, for whatever one wants: oil, mountains on Jupiter, a lost child, a buried body, a hostage site thousands of miles away, a secret meeting inside the Pentagon or the Kremlin, etc.
To be clear, dowsing is a "forced-choice" type of psychic functioning, e.g. you have to choose one of a limited set of areas where something might be, you have to choose one of the numbers, options, cards, etc. in a psychic test. Remote viewing by definition is a "free-response" type of psychic function, and specifically different from dowsing in that regard (this had a radical change in effect-sizes in the science lab, so it matters). RV is designed for "describing" while dowsing is designed for "locating" and they are quite different results; RV is actually quite poor for locational work, although when combined with both dowsing and on-the-ground investigation, can have stunning results, such as the Japanese's version of the FBI and their cold case file work with viewer Joseph McMoneagle the last several years (his data has led to them finding a lot of people, some missing over 30 years). However it was not RV alone that managed that. You can probably find some of the hype-laden but still very interesting TV show clips from Japan on the internet.
> Ingo Swann and Harold Sherman claim to have done remote viewing of Mercury and Jupiter. Targ and Puthoff reported that their remote viewing compared favorably to the findings of the Mariner 10 and Pioneer 10 research spacecraft. Isaac Asimov did a similar comparison and found that 46% of the observation claims of the astral travelers were wrong. Also, only one out of 65 claims made by the remote viewers was a fact that either was not obvious or not obtainable from reference books (Randi 1982).
What you leave out here is a variety of things worth considering. (You'd want to start this review from the present, since there is more known now than in the past.) First, there maybe 25 'theories' about what 'might' be the case on a planet. Let us say that 3 of them are the most-favored ideas in science. If a psychic describes the way a planet "actually is according to his psi," and it turns out to be one of those 25 (but not one of those 3), this does not make the data less accurate, and it shouldn't make it invalidated, either--if that is what they feel is true, that is what they should report. If you ask a psychic for information, they give you valid information, and then you later expound on why they were right but "it doesn't count," then there is an obvious problem with the framework of the evaluation.
Secondly, what skeptics will claim as "obvious" after the fact is often what was literally laughed at, at the time--mocked or dismissed--but when it turned out to be true, then all the sudden it was "obvious" or "one of many theories already documented" and the accurate psi work "doesn't count." Nobody goes back and brings up the articles that mocked the psi info to begin with and mentions that oh by the way, many of the things we made fun of turned out to be right. Some data was inaccurate--some was not--we learn more about Jupiter all the time.
A good portion of the materials I've read from skeptics has more factual errors than the material from the other side of the spectrum. If nothing else, you might wish to link to Ingo Swann's own article about the Jupiter viewing just for more info: http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/1973JupiterRVProbe.html
or if the comment wrapping eats that link, here's a short one: http://tinyurl.com/SwannJupiter1973
> Targ and Puthoff, whom Randi refers to as the Laurel and Hardy of psi research, were not put off by the fact that Swann claimed he saw a 30,000 ft. mountain range on Jupiter on his astral voyage when there is no such thing.
When he described this, the planet Jupiter was in great part unknown. Why would they be "put off" for it? That would be inherently unscientific. You cannot ask for information and then tell people, "That can't be right based on what we already know," since the point was to see if they could describe something we did not already know. You cannot judge the validity of information until you have factual feedback. And as it turns out, the belief that "there was no such thing" is old, and at this point it's also wrong (whether it was during the session time we won't know until we're a lot closer to Jupiter, but it now seems highly likely to be right). Read Swann's article for the references and the further comments.
> It is hard to imagine why anyone would have faith in such claims.
Faith? Remote viewing is not about faith. You record data. You wait for factual confirmation. The data is accurate, or it is inaccurate. Faith is not involved in that anywhere. Psychic work might relate to that; the remote viewing protocol exists in great part to put psi into a science protocol, inside which "faith" doesn't have much part.
> If I told you that I had been to your home town and had seen a 30,000 ft. high mountain there, and you knew there was no such mountain, would you think I had really visited your town even if I correctly pointed out that there is a river nearby and it sometimes floods?
If a victim of a crime describe a man and got some of the data right and some of the data wrong, and admission, facts and DNA evidence proved which man committed the crime, do we insist that because she said he had brown hair and it was black, or because she said he was tall and he really wasn't, that obviously she never met the man and the proven crime never happened? Did your teachers never play that game with you where someone runs into the room and says/does something and runs out, and then they make you describe it all in detail, and the person comes back and you evaluate what people missed or got wrong? Human perception even with perfectly ordinary process and major physical senses is extremely prone to error and misinterpretation. Psi-based data is ridiculously subtle most the time and even more prone to it. The fact that ANY process in the world "is subject to error" does not invalidate the existence of the process. Michael Jordan misses the shot sometimes but that doesn't mean he can't play basketball -- or that basketball doesn't exist.
> Swann, in a lovely ad hoc hypothesis, now claims that astral travel is so fast that he probably wasn't seeing Jupiter but another planet in another solar system! There really is a big mountain out there on some planet in some solar system in some galaxy.
Where did you get this reference? Swann's own article on the subject says nothing like this. I am regularly seeing references to "alleged excuses made up" that turn out to be an invention of the person who makes it up to write it down (I don't mean you, I mean wherever you got that). Maybe he did say that but I've read a LOT in this field over the past 13 years and do not recall seeing that. I would have thought it was lame too.
> The CIA and the U.S. Army thought enough of remote viewing to spend millions of taxpayers' dollars on "Stargate."
Actually this is incorrect. The CIA never owned any of the many 'projects' that were involved over the years. They funded a tiny (pocket-change) study in the 1970s, that was all. Actual funding and official drive, based on the results, came from military sources. (The CIA now claims they didn't want it then; that was not correct. They simply didn't need to fund it, since someone else did, and they repeatedly hired the project's viewers for nearly two decades. If they didn't work, why did they keep hiring them--the biggest repeat customer?) The CIA eventually wanted to own the project but the owners wouldn't let it go. The funders -- generally, the customers -- included every branch of military, intelligence, as well as corporations.
In the mid-1980s the program changed substantially in the intelligence viewing part, and the overall program was moved underneath the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency, eg the Army). Although the science continued and much intell work continued from the science lab, it appears that following the program change, the results in the intell unit itself dwindled (which in retrospect is not at all surprising; it's amazing it lasted as long as it did). Eventually the DIA wanted to be done with that eventually, and they threw the last remaining project like a hot potato to the CIA. At that point, the CIA did not want it either, mostly because it had already been revealed several times in public and was about to be seriously 'revealed' by a writer (the author of 'JFK', Jim Marrs, who told me the book was printing when it was pulled, pulped, his editor was reassigned, and two weeks later the tabloids announced the secret psychic program, and sometime later the CIA publicly announced it)--they have had enough with getting in trouble for stuff they shouldn't be doing.
The CIA had just had a significant budget cut--but the program came with a budget and personnel slots. They closed it as fast as they humanly could--qualifying as 'popcorn science' at best if the details are known--and took the budget and personnel slots for their own use. They owned it for a few months -- just long enough to close it. That's all.
> The "talented viewer" was Joe McMoneagle, a former army psychic spy and part of the Stargate project. Cole based his claim on the testimony of Dr. Jessica Utts, a statistics professor at the University of California, Davis, who was hired by the government to do an assessment of "psychic functioning." Channel 10 interviewed Dr. Utts, who confirmed that there is good reason to believe that Joe McMoneagle does indeed have psychic powers. Utts coauthored several papers with physicist Edwin May, who took over the remote viewing program of Stargate from Puthoff in 1985. So, she was not a disinterested party.
She was one of two scientists hired by the CIA for that assessment. She is a statistician, and anybody with half a serious interest in actual Remote Viewing (vs. armchair mocking) really should read her paper "Replication and Meta-Analysis in Parapsychology (Statistical Science, 1991)" as that well describes why she decided, based on math not faith, that the free-response (RV) psi being studied appeared to have some effect that could not be explained away. A link to her various psi papers (a minor part of her overall work) is here: http://www.stat.ucdavis.edu/~utts/psipapers.html
A quote from that one: "The recent focus on meta-analysis in parapsychology has revealed that there are small but consistently nonzero effects across studies, experimenters and laboratories. The sizes of the effects in forced-choice studies appear to be comparable to those reported in some medical studies that had been heralded as breakthroughs. [...] Free-response studies show effect sizes of far greater magnitude." One result of this publication was a noticeable shift in parapsychology science from proof-oriented studies to process-oriented studies.
Dr. Ray Hyman, a long-time leading skeptic against all things psi, was the other scientist hired by the CIA for that assessment. He has also published in the negative. I did not see you invalidating his participation or opinions based on being "not a disinterested party". If she's not, he's certainly not. :-)
> CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said: "The CIA is reviewing available programs regarding parapsychological phenomena, mostly remote viewing, to determine their usefulness to the intelligence community" (Cole 1995). He also notes that the Stargate program was found to be "unpromising" in the 1970s and was turned over to the Defense Department.
Frankly, believing much of anything an official CIA spokesman says, flags a lot more skepticism in me than believe in psi.
> One of the psychics, David Morehouse, was recruited when he took a bullet in the head in Jordan and started having visions and vivid nightmares.
That is disputed by most everybody except Mr. Morehouse, just as trivia. :-)
> He's written a book about it (Psychic Warrior) and it is sure to be better received by true believers than Mansfield's disclaimer.
The book is dominantly fiction, but it's a good read. Mr. Morehouse was in the process of being court-marshalled when he suddenly claimed that his brief stint in that previous project had caused such severe psychological trauma that he should be released on medical claims (rather than likely imprisoned). His roommate and business partner in the "strategic deception" unit that followed their brief RV unit term, later went into late night radio claiming that aliens were going to destroy earth, and pretty much annihilating every factual understanding of legitimate science-based RV that exists (this would be Ed Dames).
So... you might want to seek another source of information regarding the program or its viewers than skeptics and psychos, nothing personal, but there really are better sources of information. ;-)
Best,
PJ Gaenir
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