Remote viewing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing Make a donation to Wikipedia and give the gift of knowledge! Remote viewing From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The neutrality of this article is disputed. Remote viewing Please see the discussion on thetalk page. Events Please do not remove this message until thedispute is resolved. Remote viewing Stargate Project Remote viewing (RV) is a broad term for a variety of techniques or protocols People employed to produce and control extra-sensory perception (ESP). The term was coined in the early 1970s by principal researchers at SRI International, Ingo Swann Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, mainly to distinguish the protocols they Hal Puthoff were investigating from older ESP protocols.[1] (Targ & Puthoff 1977, Pat Price Puthoff 1996, Schnabel 1997). There is no scientific proof for RV or ESP. Russell Targ Joseph McMoneagle In RV, a viewer attempts to gather information via ESP on a remote target. Paul H. Smith The target is usually an object, a place, or a person, and many remote Ed May viewers believe that the target may be situated anywhere in space or time. Mel Riley The viewer often has no prior knowledge of the target's identity. Adherents Dale Graff believe that data generated by the remote viewer is best combined with data Lyn Buchanan provided by other viewers and evaluated by a separate analyst. (Targ and Aaron Donahue Puthoff 1977, Puthoff 1996, Schnabel 1997.) David Morehouse Gerald O'Donnell <edit> Contents (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Remote_Viewing&action=edit) 1 History 1.1 Background 1.2 Early SRI experiments 1.3 Government sponsorship 2 Criticism 3 Response to Criticism 4 Popular Culture 5 Selected remote viewing study participants 6 Books 7 Papers 8 References 9 External links History Background From the World War II era the US government occasionally funded ESP research. But as of the early 1970's it had no significant program in this area. At the same time, the US intelligence community learned that the USSR and China were giving high priority to ESP research, and to psi research generally. U.S. intelligence officials therefore became receptive to the idea of having their own, competing psi research program. (Schnabel 1997) Early SRI experiments The report of a low-key psi experiment conducted in 1972 by SRI laser physicist, Hal Puthoff, with purported psychic Ingo Swann led to a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. The immediate result was a $50,000 CIA-sponsored project whose goal was to find some way of using psi operationally. (Schnabel 1997, Puthoff 1996, Kress 1977/1999, Smith 2005) As research continued, the SRI team published papers in Nature (Targ & Puthoff, 1974), in Proceedings of the IEEE (Puthoff & Targ, 1976), and in the proceedings of a symposium on consciousness for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Puthoff, et al, 1981). Government sponsorship The initial grant was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials including John McMahon, then the head of the Office of Technical Service and later the Agency's deputy director, became strong supporters of the program. By the mid 1970s, facing the post-Watergate revelations of its "skeletons," and after internal criticism of the program, the CIA dropped sponsorship of the SRI research effort. Sponsorship was picked up by the Air Force, led by analyst Dale E. Graff of the Foreign Technology Division. In 1979, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which had been providing some taskings to the SRI psychics, was ordered to develop its own program by the Army's chief intelligence officer, Gen. Ed Thompson. CIA operations officers, working from McMahon's office and other offices, also continued to provide taskings to SRI's psychic subjects. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005, Atwater 2001) The program had three parts (Mumford, et al, 1995). First was the evaluation of psi research performed by the U.S.S.R. and China, which appears to have been better-funded and better-supported than the government research in the U.S. (Schnabel 1997) In the second part of the program, SRI managed its own stable of "natural" psychics both for research purposes and to make them available for tasking by a variety of US intelligence agencies. The most famous results from these years were the description of a big crane at a Soviet nuclear research facility (Kress 1977/199, Targ 1996), the description of a new class of Soviet strategic submarine (Smith 2005, McMoneagle 2002) and the 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) 1 of 4 9/8/2007 4:46 PM Advanced Media Group Page 1 of 201 09/10/2007 Remote viewing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing The third branch of the program was a research project intended to find ways to make ESP -- now called "remote viewing" -- more accurate and reliable. The intelligence community offices that tasked the psychics seemed to believe that the phenomenon was real. But in the view of these taskers, a remote viewer could be sensationally "on" one day and inexplicably "off" the next, a fact that made it hard for the technique to be officially accepted. Through SRI, psychics were studied for years in a search for physical (e.g., brain-wave) correlates that would 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) In part because the program managers believed that anyone could learn accurate remote-viewing, the loss (through death and retirement) of the "naturals" was never replenished. Within the program, this was controversial. Some of the "naturals" believed that their talents were superior to those of the trainees. The trainees (see Smith 2005, Schnabel 1997, Buchanan 2003) generally believed that the research program had succeeded not only in training them acceptably but in finding ways to make remote viewing an intelligence-collection tool as reliable as other standard methods (for example, human-source intelligence, which is not always reliable). Meanwhile, one of the authors of an official 1995 report, authorized by the CIA wrote that "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community."[2]. Some agencies and offices sent taskings to the program routinely but, fearing the "giggle factor," were loath to document their involvement. Only a few intelligence officials, including the Army generals Edmund Thompson and Albert Stubblebine, and senior DIA official Jack Vorona, were willing to champion it openly. Others, such as generals Harry Soyster and William Odom, and Admiral Sam Koslov, allegedly wished to end the project. The struggle between "true unbelievers" and "true believers" 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, in effect, prove its uselessness. 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. However, by this time Vorona, Stubblebine and Thompson had all retired, and the program's support essentially depended on a key group of Senators, especially Democrat Robert Byrd, who chaired the Appropriations Committee. One of Byrd's top aides, Richard D'Amato, was the boyfriend of a female remote viewer, and evidently on the order of the supportive Senators kept the program alive with earmarks to appropriations bills. After the Democrats lost control of the Senate in late 1994, and Byrd could no longer exert the same level of control over appropriations, the remote viewing program was effectively doomed. 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) 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. 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.[3] One of the reviewers was Ray Hyman, a long-time opponent 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 (http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~utts/air2.html) , with some subjects scoring 5%-15% above chance.[4] Ray Hyman argued for a null result and the program was officially terminated. [4].[2] 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 had the date of the session written at the top of the page.