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 claimed the coinage himself, tracing his procedures to the French engineer René Warcollier’s telepathy studies earlier in the century. Wherever it 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. The 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. A demonstration that year drew a visit from 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 spending heavily on “psychotronic” research, and no one in Washington wanted 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, and all had broken with the church before the decade ended.

In October 1974 Targ and Puthoff published their results in Nature, reporting experiments “suggesting the existence of one or more perceptual modalities” beyond the known senses. Publication there gave the claim a mainstream visibility it had never had, and the answer arrived through the same journal. David Marks and Richard Kammann, at the University of Otago in New Zealand, ran thirty-five replication studies and could not verify the findings. What they found instead became the canonical critique: the session transcripts handed to SRI’s judges contained extraneous cues — a reference to “yesterday’s two targets,” dates left on pages — enough to let a careful reader reconstruct the target order with nothing paranormal occurring at all. Targ and Puthoff declined to share the unpublished transcripts; Marks and Kammann eventually obtained them from the judge. Marks went on to match transcripts to target sites with perfect accuracy using the cues alone, without visiting a single site, and when the cues were removed the results fell to chance. In 1980 Charles Tart, Puthoff, and Targ answered with a rejudging of edited transcripts that they reported as still above chance; when Marks finally examined those edited transcripts in 1985, he and Christopher Scott replied that the cues were still present, and that the experiments had demonstrated “only the repeated failure of the investigators to remove sensory cues.” 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.

The government program ran on its own track, changing names as it changed sponsors: CIA funding for coordinate work from 1970 under SCANATE; an Army evaluation, GONDOLA WISH, in 1977; an operational unit at Fort Meade from 1978 as GRILL FLAME; CENTER LANE from 1983; SUN STREAK from 1985, under the Defense Intelligence Agency; STAR GATE from 1991, when the research contract moved to SAIC under Edwin May. Over two decades it cost roughly twenty million dollars and employed about forty people, some twenty-three of them viewers. The operational lore centers on Price, a former Burbank police officer who in 1974 worked against map coordinates of a Soviet site at Semipalatinsk and produced sketches of an enormous gantry crane that resemble, strikingly, the intelligence imagery later declassified beside them. The sketches are real, and the CIA took them seriously at the time. The official summary that records the hit also records the remainder: most of what the viewer reported was incorrect or could not be evaluated. That ratio is the operational record in miniature. The claim-list that grew 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. Asked to help find a kidnapping victim in Italy, the program’s contribution was a stone house with a red roof — a description that fits a sizeable fraction of Italy. By the early 1990s the effort had dwindled to a few viewers at Fort Meade, kept alive largely by a handful of interested patrons in Congress.

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. What they produced is the most precise 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 has been well established” — the statistical results were far beyond chance, and the usual objections had, in her judgment, been refuted. Her load-bearing argument was consistency across laboratories with no stake in each other: the remote-viewing effect sizes matched, within a few hundredths, those of the independent ganzfeld telepathy experiments — novice subjects near 0.16 in both, experienced subjects at 0.385 and 0.35, hit rates around a third where chance predicts a quarter. Hyman conceded more than skeptics usually concede. The effect sizes, he wrote, were “too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes,” not explicable by selective reporting or statistical misuse, and he admitted he had no ready explanation for them. He refused the conclusion anyway: an unexplained departure from chance is not yet a demonstration of psychic functioning, because psi is defined only negatively, as whatever remains when known causes are excluded; because no independent laboratory had replicated the work; and because each previous generation of parapsychology’s best evidence had eventually traced to a flaw no one had seen at the time. Utts, replying, accepted his map of where they agreed and where they did not. And 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 no documented case in which a remote viewing had been of value to the intelligence community, and 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 data had been examined; David Marks found it odd that Utts, a past co-author of May’s, had been chosen to judge his program — and a later reevaluation of the review’s flagship experiment found that it could not be fully reconstructed from the records and contained flaws that might account for its outcome. Even the cleanest exhibit, in other words, would not hold still.

What the state abandoned, the culture absorbed. In March 1999 program veterans — Targ, Puthoff, Fort Meade viewers and trainers, and, more unexpectedly, the skeptic sociologist Marcello Truzzi — founded the International Remote Viewing Association, which still holds conferences and publishes a magazine; a louder wing carried the method off toward Atlantis and Mars on late-night radio. The British Ministry of Defence ran its own small study in 2002, with negative results disclosed only in 2007. And in January 2017, after a freedom-of-information lawsuit, the CIA placed some thirteen million pages of declassified records online, the STAR GATE files flagged among the highlights — transcripts, sketches, and memoranda that until then could be read 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 documentation has settled nothing.

Seen from the long angle this encyclopedia takes, remote viewing is a divinatory art that consented to be scored. The claim is ancient — the clairvoyant of the séance room, the magician traveling in the spirit vision — and the renaming did its work, walking that claim out of its own lineage and into the hardest patronage available: laser physicists, Nature, the Central Intelligence Agency. The migration there and back, more than any single result, is what makes the episode worth attention. For twenty years the question lived inside an apparatus built to settle it, and the verdict came back split: 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. Both halves are true at once, and have been since 1995. The program was built to settle the question. The question outlived it.

→ Related: Modern Ganzfeld Experimental Parapsychology · Divination