Remote viewing

1 · What it is

Seeing at a distance

Remote viewing means describing a place, an object or a picture that you cannot see and know nothing about: a site miles away, or a photo sealed in an envelope. Unlike telepathy, nobody has to be looking at the target at the time.

It became a lab subject in the 1970s at SRI, a research institute in California, where the physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff ran trials and later worked for the US government.

2 · How people practise it

A number, a sketch, then words

The target hides behind a reference number, so the viewer knows nothing but, say, “4721”. Viewers are taught to sketch shapes and note textures, colours and sensations first, and to hold back from naming anything (“a bridge”), because names pull in guesses.

Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) splits a session into set stages, from first impressions to detail. Associative Remote Viewing (ARV) is used for yes-or-no questions: each possible outcome is paired with a different photo, and the viewer describes the photo they will be shown once the answer is known.

In careful practice, the match is judged by someone who does not know the target.

3 · What the labs tested

SRI and Star Gate

In 1974 Targ and Puthoff reported in Nature that viewers had described sites that an experimenter was visiting, well enough for judges to match descriptions to sites above chance. Nature printed the paper with an editorial setting out its referees’ doubts.

A longer account followed in 1976. The work continued for about two decades under a series of US government programmes, known together as Star Gate, and thousands of pages of its documents are now public.

4 · Where it’s contested

Cues, judges and a split verdict

David Marks and Richard Kammann found that the SRI transcripts carried cues, such as dates and mentions of earlier sessions, that could help a judge put them in the right order without any psi.

In 1995 the CIA asked the American Institutes for Research to evaluate the programme. Its two expert reviewers disagreed. The statistician Jessica Utts concluded that psychic functioning had been well established. The psychologist Ray Hyman called that premature: the effects had not been independently replicated, and possible flaws had not been ruled out.

The report itself concluded that remote viewing had not been shown to be of use in intelligence work, and that continuing it was not warranted.