Everything about Remote Viewing totally explained
Remote Viewing (RV) is the process by which a person can supposedly gather information through paranormal means on a remote target that's hidden from physical view and typically separated from the viewer at some distance, and is a form of
extra-sensory perception. The term was introduced by
parapsychologists Russell Targ and
Harold Puthoff in 1974.
Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the
Stargate Project, a 20 million dollar U.S. Federal Government sponsored research program to determine the possibility of psychic phenomena, and any potential military application. The program was terminated in 1995, citing a lack of evidence that demonstrated the program had any value to the intelligence community. Critics have demonstrated that clues inadvertently revealed by researchers explain how purported remote viewers can obtain information on remote viewing locations. Science writer
Martin Gardner, among others, describes the topic as
pseudoscience.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, Smith 2005)
The third branch of the program was a research project intended to find out if ESP – now called "remote viewing" – could be made accurate and reliable. The intelligence community offices that tasked the group seemed to believe that the phenomenon was real. But in the view of these taskers, a remote viewer could be "on" one day and "off" the next, a fact that made it hard for the technique to be officially accepted. Through SRI, individuals were studied for years in a search for physical (for example, brain-wave) correlates that might 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, McMoneagle 2002)
Decline and termination
A struggle between unbelievers and "
true believers" in the sponsor organizations provided much of the program's actual drama. Each side seems to have been utterly convinced that the other's views were wrong. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005)
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 evaluate its objective usefulness. According to an account by former SRI-trained remote-viewer, Paul Smith (2005), 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.
After the Democrats lost control of the Senate in late 1994, funding declined and the program went into decline. The project was transferred out of DIA to the
CIA in 1995, with the promise that it would be evaluated there, but most participants in the program believed that it would be terminated. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005, Mumford,
et al 1995)
AIR evaluation of remote viewing
In 1995, the CIA hired the
American Institutes for Research, a perennial intelligence-industry contractor, to perform a retrospective evaluation of the results generated by the remote-viewing program, the
Stargate Project. Most of the program's results were not seen by the evaluators, with the report focusing on the most recent experiments, and only from government-sponsored research. One of the reviewers was Ray Hyman, a long-time critic of psi research while another was
Jessica Utts who, as a supporter of psi, was chosen to put forward the pro-psi argument. Utts maintained that there had been a
statistically significant positive effect, with some subjects scoring 5%-15% above chance.Based upon
both of their collected findings, which recommended a higher level of critical research and tighter controls. The CIA terminated the 20 million dollar project in 1995.
Time magazine stated in 1995 three full-time psychics were still working on a $500,000-a-year budget out of Fort Meade, Maryland, which would soon be shut down. To study this, he began a research laboratory known as Mobius. A central question in the seminal IEEE paper (Puthoff & Targ, 1976) was whether RV was electromagnetic in nature, or something else. Schwartz had begun to consider how this might be studied in 1973, after reading the work of Soviet Academician Leonid Vasiliev, the tutor for Russian psychic
Nina Kulagina,. This work had eliminated all of the EM spectrum except for very low frequency ranges, known as
ELF.
Testing in the ELF range required a submarine, because the only shield for ELF is hundreds of feet of seawater. In 1976, Schwartz was offered access to a small research submersible capable of going to the depths required by University of Southern California Institute for Marine and Coastal Studies. In 1977, just as the experiment was about to go to sea, he invited SRI to assist him in carrying out his study. The Project, known as Deep Quest, and carried out with logistical support from the USC Institute. It took place in the waters off
Santa Catalina Island. Two Remote Viewings, one by Hella Hammid, one by
Ingo Swann described where target individuals were hiding in California. Both sessions were conducted while the submarine was at depth, and both were somewhat successful. Respectively the two targets were a tree and a shopping mall. Swann commented his site "could be City Hall."
The experiment also tested a protocol Schwartz had devised involving five multiple viewers. Four were given charts of the Pacific ocean and were asked to locate an unknown wreck on the seafloor. They chose as their location a
10 mile square area near Santa Catalina. The sunken vessel was determined by the Bureau of Land Management Marine Sites Board to be previously unknown. A documentary was shot as the events took place of the entire project was made.[Schwartz,1977, 2007] But the riches which Schwartz and his investors have sought in their many undersea expeditions have never been found. The ship Schwartz's team found on the Bahamas Banks was carrying molasses,
not the treasure that was their goal.
Schwartz also claims he was involved in the discovery and the first modern mapping of the Eastern Harbor of Alexandria and the discovery of numerous shipwrecks as well as Mark Anthony's palace in Alexandria, the Ptolemaic Palace Complex of Cleopatra, and the remains of the Lighthouse of Pharos, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Much of this was discounted by two on-site Egyptian scholars whom Schwartz had listed as research associates, Dr. Shehetta Adam, head of Egypt's Department of Antiquities and Dr. Mostafa El Abbadi.
Criticism
According to Dr.
David Marks in experiments conducted in the 1970s at the
Stanford Research Institute, the notes given to the judges contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets, or they'd the date of the session written at the top of the page. Dr. Marks concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates.
Dr. Marks has also suggested that the participants of remote viewing experiments are influenced by
subjective validation, a process through which correspondences are perceived between stimuli that are in fact associated purely randomly.
Details and transcripts of the SRI remote viewing experiments themselves were found to be edited and even unattainable.
Others have said that, the information from remote viewing sessions can be vague and include a lot of erroneous data.
According to
James Randi, controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts.
Professor
Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) has said that he agrees remote viewing has been proven using the normal standards of science, but that the bar of evidence needs to be much higher for paranormal claims and thus he remains unconvinced:
Martin Gardner, and others, describe the topic of remote viewing as
pseudoscience. Gardner says that founding researcher
Harold Puthoff was an active
Scientologist prior to his work at
Stanford University, and that this influenced his research at SRI. In 1970, the
Church of Scientology published a notarized letter that had been written by Puthoff while he was conducting research on remote viewing at Stanford. The letter read, in part: "Although critics viewing the system [Scientology] from the outside may form the impression that Scientology is just another of many quasi-educational quasi-religious 'schemes,' it's in fact a highly sophistical and highly technological system more characteristic of modern corporate planning and applied technology." Among some of the ideas that Puthoff supported regarding remote viewing was the claim that two followers of
Madame Blavatsky, founder of
theosophy, were able to remote-view the inner structure of atoms.
Russell Targ, cofounder of the Stanford Research Institute's investigation into psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s
Joseph McMoneagle, one of the early remote viewers. See: Stargate Project
Ed Dames, formerly associated with PSI TECH, Inc.
Courtney Brown, founder of the Farsight Institute
David Morehouse, remote viewer during Stargate program
Lyn Buchanan
David Marks, the critic of remote viewing, after finding sensory cues and editing in the original transcripts generated by Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s
Gerald O'Donnell, Founder and President of the Academy of Remote Viewing and Remote Influencing Reality and Thought
Books
David Marks, Ph.D., "The Psychology of the Psychic (2nd edn.)" Prometheus Books, 2000. ISBN 1-57392-798-8
Courtney Brown, Ph.D., Remote Viewing : The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception. Farsight Press, 2005. ISBN 0-9766762-1-4
David Morehouse, Psychic Warrior, St. Martin's, 1996, ISBN 0-312-96413-7
Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies, Dell, 1997, ISBN 0-440-22306-7
Paul H. Smith, Reading the Enemy's Mind: Inside Star Gate -- America's Psychic Espionage Program, Forge, 2005, ISBN 0-312-87515-0
Ronson, Jon, The Men who Stare at Goats, Picador, 2004, ISBN 0-330-37547-4, written to accompany the TV series The Crazy Rulers of the World (External Link
)The military budget cuts after Vietnam and how it all began.
Paolini, Christopher Eragon & Eldest Knopf publishing, 1989 ISBN 0-432-2191-5
Buchanan, Lyn, The Seventh Sense: The Secrets Of Remote Viewing As Told By A "Psychic Spy" For The U.S. Military, ISBN 0-7434-6268-8
F. Holmes Atwater, Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul: Living with Guidance, Hampton Roads 2001, ISBN 1-57174-247-6
McMoneagle, Joseph, The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy, Hampton Roads 2002, ISBN 1-57174-225-5Further Information
Get more info on 'Remote Viewing'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://remote_viewing.totallyexplained.com">Remote viewing Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
