Remote Viewing

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In a remote-viewing trial, a person sits in a closed room and tries to describe a place they have never seen — a bridge, an airfield, a facility reduced to a pair of map coordinates — and the transcript is then scored against the target. The claim under test is one of the oldest the species has made about itself: that the mind can know at a distance, without the senses’ help. The name is the newest thing about it, and the newness was deliberate.

The term surfaced in December 1971, during experiments at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York. Russell Targ’s later account credits the suggestion to Ingo Swann, the artist and psychic at the center of those sessions; Swann traced his own procedures to the French engineer René Warcollier’s drawing-transmission studies earlier in the century, work that had treated the faculty as a thing to be tested under controlled conditions decades before the phrase attached to American parapsychology. Wherever the coinage began, the intent is legible. “Remote viewing” sounds like a procedure; “clairvoyance” sounds like a séance. The phrase was built to carry an old claim into a laboratory without its history showing. That laboratory materialized in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, where Harold Puthoff, a laser physicist, had begun testing Swann; Targ, another laser physicist, joined the same year. Within weeks of Puthoff circulating his notes on Swann’s performances, two visitors arrived carrying that report — their credentials identified them as officers of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology — and the agency began to pay. The money had a Cold War logic. American intelligence assessments held that the Soviet Union was investing heavily in “psychotronic” research, and no one in Washington wished to own the decision to leave a possible gap unexamined. One further fact about the founding circle belongs in the record: Swann, Puthoff, Targ, and the program’s most celebrated subject, Pat Price, were all Scientologists in the early 1970s — Swann had reached the church’s advanced “Operating Thetan” levels — and all had broken with it before the decade was out.

The Nature publication and the controversy that answered it

In October 1974 Targ and Puthoff published in Nature, under the title “Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding,” reporting experiments they read as suggesting the existence of one or more perceptual channels through which a person obtains information not presented to any known sense. Publication in a premier journal gave the claim a mainstream visibility it had never had, and the answer arrived through the same pages. David Marks and Richard Kammann, psychologists at the University of Otago in New Zealand, ran a series of thirty-five replication studies and could not verify the findings; their 1978 Nature paper, “Information transmission in remote viewing experiments,” reported the failure. What they found in its place became the canonical critique. The session transcripts handed to SRI’s judges carried extraneous cues — a stray reference to the previous day’s pair of targets, dates left at the head of pages — enough to let a careful reader reconstruct the target order with nothing paranormal occurring. Targ and Puthoff declined to share the unpublished transcripts; Marks and Kammann obtained them at length from the judge. Marks then matched transcripts to target sites with perfect accuracy using the cues alone, without visiting a single location, and when the cues were stripped out the results collapsed to chance. He set the argument out fully in a 1981 Nature note pointedly titled “Sensory cues invalidate remote viewing experiments.” In 1980 Charles Tart, Puthoff, and Targ answered with a rejudging of edited transcripts that they reported as still above chance; when Marks and Christopher Scott finally examined those edited transcripts, their 1986 Nature reply, “Remote viewing exposed,” concluded that the cues had never been removed at all and that the experiments demonstrated only the investigators’ repeated inability to remove sensory cueing. The four-paper exchange, 1974 to 1986, is the methodological spine of the subject: a striking claim, a failed replication, an artifact identified, a rebuttal, the artifact found again. Neither side conceded, and the pattern would recur for a quarter-century.

The government program: from SCANATE to STAR GATE

The classified effort ran on its own track, changing names as it changed sponsors. CIA funding for coordinate-based work — “scan by coordinate,” whence SCANATE — began in 1970; an Army evaluation, GONDOLA WISH, followed in 1977; an operational unit stood up at Fort Meade, Maryland, in 1978 as GRILL FLAME; the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command redesignated it CENTER LANE in 1983; when Army money ended in late 1985 the unit became SUN STREAK under the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Scientific and Technical Intelligence Directorate; and from 1991 it carried the name STAR GATE, with the research contract moved to Science Applications International Corporation under the physicist Edwin May. Across more than two decades the program and its related activities cost roughly twenty million dollars and drew in over forty people, about twenty-three of them viewers.

The operational lore centers on Price, a former police officer who in 1974 worked against the map coordinates of a Soviet site at Semipalatinsk in Siberia. Knowing nothing of why the analysts wanted it, he produced sketches of an enormous multistory gantry crane that resemble, strikingly, the satellite-derived intelligence drawings later declassified beside them. In Puthoff’s own account the description of the crane, an unusual structure, was taken by the sponsor as a sign of genuine target acquisition; the same account concedes that the results contained “noise along with the signal.” That ratio is the operational record in miniature: the official summary that preserves the hit also preserves the remainder, most of it incorrect or impossible to evaluate. The claim-list that accreted around the unit — a downed Soviet bomber located within several miles, a new class of submarine described months before it was sighted — carries asterisks throughout, and the program’s own reviewers later noted that reports were sometimes adjusted after the fact to fit background information already in hand, which makes the celebrated hits impossible to score honestly. Asked in 1981 to help locate Brigadier General James Dozier, kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Italy, the program’s contribution was a stone house with a red roof — a description fitting a sizeable fraction of the country. By the early 1990s the effort had dwindled to three viewers at Fort Meade, kept alive largely by a handful of interested patrons in Congress.

The 1995 review: Utts, Hyman, and a divided verdict

In 1995, under congressional instruction, the CIA took custody of the program and commissioned the American Institutes for Research to evaluate it. The reviewers were chosen to disagree: Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California, Davis, broadly sympathetic to the data, and Ray Hyman, a University of Oregon psychologist and the field’s most persistent critic. The report they produced — “An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications,” dated September 1995 — is the most precise public statement of the question’s status that exists, and it bears stating exactly.

Utts concluded that, by the standards applied to any other area of science, psychic functioning had been well established; the statistical results, she wrote, were far beyond what chance predicts, and the usual objections about methodological flaws had in her judgment been soundly refuted. Her load-bearing argument was consistency across laboratories with no stake in one another. The remote-viewing effect sizes from SRI and SAIC matched, within a few hundredths, the figures from the independent ganzfeld telepathy program at the Psychophysical Research Laboratories: novice remote viewers at SRI reached an effect size of 0.164 against 0.17 for ganzfeld novices, while experienced remote viewers stood at 0.385 against 0.35 for experienced ganzfeld subjects — hit rates running near a third where chance predicts a quarter. Such convergence, she argued, could not be readily explained by flaws or fraud confined to any single laboratory. (The adjacent ganzfeld program and the broader laboratory study of mind-to-mind contact belong to telepathy; what remote viewing borrows from them here is only the matching number.)

Hyman conceded more than skeptics usually concede. He agreed that the later SAIC experiments were free of the methodological weaknesses that had plagued the early SRI work and of the better-known flaws that wreck parapsychological studies; the effect sizes, he wrote, were too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes. He went so far as to say that something other than chance departures from the null hypothesis had occurred in the experiments. He refused the conclusion anyway, on three grounds. A significant departure from chance does not by itself demonstrate psychic functioning, because without a positive theory of anomalous cognition no single cause can be assigned to the anomaly — psi remains defined only negatively, as whatever is left when known causes are excluded. No independent laboratory outside the program’s own circle had replicated the work. And each previous generation of parapsychology’s best evidence — its correlations with extroversion, with belief, with altered states — had eventually failed to replicate, so that the field’s history counsels patience rather than verdict. Utts, replying, accepted his map of where they agreed and where they did not.

On two points there was no disagreement at all: the statistical anomaly was real, and the program had never produced intelligence anyone could act on. The review found that in no case had a remote viewing ever been used to guide an intelligence operation, and on that basis the CIA terminated and declassified the program in the last weeks of 1995. Complaints about the review arrived from both directions. May objected that only a fraction of the program’s data had been examined; Marks found it odd that Utts, a past co-author of May’s, had been chosen to judge the work she had partly helped produce. And the review’s flagship exhibit would not hold still: when Richard Wiseman and Julie Milton re-examined “Experiment One” of the SAIC series — the very study the AIR evaluators had called free of discernible flaws — they reported that important aspects of the procedure could not be reconstructed from the surviving records and that two identified channels of sensory leakage might account for the result. Even the cleanest demonstration, in other words, came apart on close handling.

After the state: the diffusion of a method

What the state abandoned, the culture absorbed. On 18 March 1999 program veterans — Targ, Puthoff, the Fort Meade viewers and trainers Lyn Buchanan, Paul H. Smith, and F. Holmes “Skip” Atwater, and, more unexpectedly, the skeptic sociologist Marcello Truzzi — organized the International Remote Viewing Association, founded at Alamogordo, New Mexico, alongside the first professional conference on the subject; it still convenes and publishes. A louder wing carried the method off toward Atlantis and Mars on late-night radio, where “remote viewing” became a brand attached to claims no laboratory had ever entertained. Other governments made their own brief experiments: the British Ministry of Defence ran a single small study in 2001–02, testing whether participants could describe pictures sealed in envelopes, judged it of little value, and disclosed the negative findings only in 2007 under a freedom-of-information request. And in January 2017, after a separate freedom-of-information lawsuit, the CIA placed roughly twelve million pages of declassified records online — some 930,000 documents in its electronic reading room — the STAR GATE files among them: transcripts, sketches, and memoranda that until then could be consulted only on four terminals at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The program is now among the best-documented episodes in the history of psychical research — the transcripts, the scoring, and both halves of the 1995 review now open to anyone who cares to read them.

The longer lineage

Remote viewing is a divinatory art submitted to scoring — kin to the crystal-gazer, the scrying mirror, the magician traveling in the spirit vision, and to the divination systems that have always claimed knowledge unbought by the senses. Its experimental ancestry runs straight through the Victorian Society for Psychical Research, which had tried a century earlier to bring “thought-transference” and “travelling clairvoyance” under controlled observation, and through the same border country that the encyclopedia’s entries on out-of-body experience and near-death experience inhabit, where the self is reported to gather information from somewhere the body is not. The renaming did its work, walking an ancient claim out of its own lineage and into the hardest patronage available — laser physicists, Nature, the Central Intelligence Agency. What gives the episode its peculiar weight is the round trip: an esoteric faculty was carried into a laboratory protocol, scored, and budgeted for two decades, then carried back out again largely intact. For twenty years the question lived inside an apparatus built to settle it. The apparatus produced a statistical residue the sharpest critic on record could not explain, inside a body of work its strongest advocate could not get replicated outside it, attached to an operational record that, by every official account, helped no one.

Research and sources

The documentary spine of the subject is small enough to read entire, and most of it is now public. The originating paper is Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff, “Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding,” Nature 251 (1974): 602–607 (https://www.nature.com/articles/251602a0). The skeptical answer is David Marks and Richard Kammann, “Information transmission in remote viewing experiments,” Nature 274 (1978): 680–681 (https://www.nature.com/articles/274680a0), developed in David Marks, “Sensory cues invalidate remote viewing experiments,” Nature 292 (1981): 177 (https://www.nature.com/articles/292177a0), and closed by David Marks and Christopher Scott, “Remote viewing exposed,” Nature 319 (1986): 444 (https://www.nature.com/articles/319444a0). The two halves of the 1995 government review are bound into one volume, American Institutes for Research, An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications (Washington, D.C., 1995), whose full text is posted by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB438/docs/doc_57.pdf); Jessica Utts’s positive assessment within it was also published separately as “An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 10, no. 1 (1996): 3–30, with the author’s copy on her university page (https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/air.pdf), and her reply to Hyman is posted alongside it (https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/response.html). The re-evaluation that unsettled the review’s flagship experiment is Richard Wiseman and Julie Milton, “Experiment One of the SAIC Remote Viewing Program: A critical re-evaluation,” Journal of Parapsychology 62, no. 4 (1998): 297–308, with a copy hosted by the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh (https://koestlerunit.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/wiseman-milton-1998.pdf). For the operational program’s own outline of code names, budget, and personnel, the Federation of American Scientists maintains the declassified summary “STAR GATE [Controlled Remote Viewing]” (https://irp.fas.org/program/collect/stargate.htm), and Puthoff’s first-person history, “CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute,” reprints the Semipalatinsk evaluation from the inside (https://www.newdualism.org/papers/H.Puthoff/CIA-Initiated%20Remote%20Viewing%20At%20Stanford%20Research%20Institute.htm). Across these documents the same shape recurs: a measurable anomaly that strengthens under meta-analysis and weakens under reconstruction, never doing both for the same reader at once.

→ Related: Modern Ganzfeld Experimental Parapsychology · Divination · Telepathy · Victorian Psychical Research Spr · Precognition · Out Of Body Experience · Near Death Experience