Probably no area of psi research in recent years has attracted as much popular attention as what is known as remote viewing. These experimental investigations of clairvoyance actually have a long history dating back to picture-drawing studies published by psychical researchers Myers and Gurney in 1882. The modern story begins in the early 1970’s with Harold Puthoff, a theoretical and experimental physicist, who had been conducting laser research at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a scientific think tank affiliated with Stanford University. In regard to a side interest Puthoff circulated a grant proposal to explore questions involving implications of quantum theory for biology. This came to the attention of an artist, Ingo Swann, who suggested that Puthoff might be interested in some apparently successful parapsychological experiments he had been involved with as a subject. Intrigued, Puthoff invited Swann to his laboratory to attempt to demonstrate some of the effects he described.
As Puthoff described this, he took Swann to the physics lab and asked him to perturb the operation of a magnetometer located in a vault below the floor of the building and protected by metal shielding, an aluminum container, copper shielding, and a superconducting shield. Swann doubled the rate at which the magnetic field in the magnetometer was decaying, then, upon request, stopped the field change altogether for a period of roughly forty-five seconds. He then went on to “remote view” the interior of the apparatus by drawing a reasonable facsimile of its rather complex construction. Puthoff stated that he was even more impressed by this feat than the former. Shortly thereafter, representatives of the CIA contacted Puthoff to inquire as to whether he was interested in working with the intelligence community to carry out some low- profile classified preliminary experiments to see whether it was possible for subjects to identify and describe a distant “target” hidden from their view.
What resulted was the initiation of a 24-year $20 million remote viewing research project at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) sponsored first by the CIA, then the Defense Intelligence Agency, and eventually in 1991 the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major defense contractor. It’s not surprising that governmental agencies would be interested. Even if the information that might be obtained would be only partially correct, it could be used as one piece of the overall puzzle that characterizes the typical intelligence operation. It could be obtained secretly at a distance, apparently couldn’t be blocked by any known form of shielding, and would be available at a very minimal cost without the necessity of sending agents into the field in potentially dangerous areas
Puthoff served as the founder and director of the program to be joined soon afterward by physicist Russell Targ and a few years later by another physicist, Edwin May. In 1985 May took over as director. The research protocol in the early investigations as described by Puthoff was as follows.
An individual called a beacon would be sent to a series of locations, typically six to ten, some distance from SRI, randomly selected from a huge list. The beacon would then spend thirty minutes at each site. At the same time the remote viewer back at SRI sitting in a locked room would attempt to draw the site and offer verbal impressions of where he imagined the beacon to be. This whole procedure was double-blind insofar as neither the experimenters nor the viewers were given any information about any of the sites where the beacon was. The list of trial targets was then given to outside blind judges, who had nothing to do with the experiment, and who were asked to go to each site in the series. While there, these judges were asked to match up the viewers’ drawings and descriptions with the series of sites, pair for pair, based on how closely they resembled each other. The investigators then examined the resulting matches to see if were more accurate than chance would predict. After a few months of experiments using this procedure enough data had been gathered to suggest that the positive matches achieved were highly unlikely to have resulted from chance alone. Puthoff published the results without revealing any link to the CIA.
At that time the CIA personnel increased their interest in the project and indicated they wanted some new experiments in which they themselves chose the targets. What a target would be was only geographic coordinates – latitude and longitude- of a site they wanted the subjects to remote view. There would be no “beacon,” and no one including the experimenters would know what the coordinates referred to except themselves. This would establish a rigorous long-distance test under external control. They sent Puthoff the first coordinates.
At that precise time a retired police officer, Pat Price, heard about this work and contacted Puthoff indicating that he’d used ESP as police commissioner to achieve some spectacular successes. Puthoff asked Price if he thought he could remote view the indicated site from the coordinates alone. Here’s Puthoff’s description of what transpired.
Price agreed and immediately sent Puthoff a five page report in which he first described a few log cabins and a couple of roads and that was it. He then added that over a ridge was an interesting place, a highly sensitive military site surrounded by the heaviest security. He described this in great detail, supplied the code names involved that all centered on the game of pool, and provided other information about what was going on there and personnel involved. Puthoff sent the verbatim transcripts back to the CIA for confirmation. Puthoff also asked psychic Ingo Swann to focus on the same coordinates and write a report which he sent along with the one prepared by Price.
The CIA initially found that the viewings were way off as the coordinates they had sent pinpointed the location of a staff member’s vacation cabin in West Virginia. However, the CIA officers noted a striking correlation between the two independent descriptions from Price and Swann. Because this seemed unlikely they then sent an OIS officer to the site itself. What he discovered was that just over the ridge was a highly sensitive underground government installation that the cabin’s owner knew nothing about. While some of the details in the Price and Swann descriptions were wrong, a lot were right and some were precisely so. For example, the labels of each file folder in a locked file drawer inside the underground building were all designated by pool terms: cue ball, cue stick, and so on. Price had even gotten the actual code name of the site.
Price was intrigued by this experiment, and as a personal challenge he decided to try scanning the other side of the globe for a Communist location equivalent to the site he’d just scanned in the U.S. He found a site in the Urals that he remotely viewed. The CIA confirmed that this viewing was substantially correct based on several classified sources within the agency. Shortly after this experiment the CIA provided Price with another set of geographic coordinates. He was locked into a small electrically shielded room with an experimenter who was blind to all aspects of the experiment. Price spoke his impressions into a tape recorder saying that he was lying on his back on the roof of a brick building on a warm sunny day. A giant crane was moving back and forth over his head. He drifted up in the air and was able to look down. The crane appeared to be riding on a track with one rail on each side of the building. He had never seen anything like it. After the viewing had been completed the CIA revealed that the site was a top-secret Soviet test site facility. They had drawings rendered from satellite photographs which featured a large crane. The CIA’s and Price’s drawings were extraordinarily similar.
Pat Price died in 1975, and the experimenters were left hoping another experimental subject as talented as he and Ingo Swann would come along. Fortunately, Joe McMoneagle arrived on the scene. He was initially discovered on the basis of a profile of individuals who might be good remote viewing subjects put together by the military. At the time McMoneagle was a senior projects officer for the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. In a series of interviews where he was questioned about his attitude concerning possible paranormal forms of knowing, he indicated he was neither a believer or a scoffer, but if such things existed they could pose a serious security threat. He was flown to California, and after passing preliminary remote viewing experiments with flying colors, began an 18-year career as a remote viewer in a secret Army project that came to be called Star Gate.
Puthoff described one of the most impressive of McMoneagle’s remote viewing ventures as follows. In the fall of 1979 Puthoff’s team was given a photo of a massive, industrial-type building, some distance from a large body of water, located somewhere in Russia. The U. S. government didn’t know what the building was, what it was used for, or what its strategic importance was. McMoneagle was given only the geographic coordinates. He immediately said that they identified a very cold wasteland with an extremely large industach file folder in a locked file drawer inside the underground building were all designated by pool terms: cue ball, cue stick, and so on. Price had even gotten the actual code name of the site.
Price was intrigued by this experiment, and as a personal challenge he decided to try scanning the other side of the globe for a Communist location equivalent to the site he’d just scanned in the U.S. He found a site in the Urals that he remotely viewed. The CIA confirmed that this viewing was substantially correct based on several classified sources within the agency. Shortly after this experiment the CIA provided Price with another set of geographic coordinates. He was locked into a small electrically shielded room with an experimenter who was blind to all aspects of the experiment. Price spoke his impressions into a tape recorder saying that he was lying on his back on the roof of a brick building on a warm sunny day. A giant crane was moving back and forth over his head. He drifted up in the air and was able to look down. The crane appeared to be riding on a track with one rail on each side of the building. He had never seen anything like it. After the viewing had been completed the CIA revealed that the site was a top-secret Soviet test site facility. They had drawings rendered from satellite photographs which featured a large crane. The CIA’s and Price’s drawings were extraordinarily similar
.Pat Price died in 1975, and the experimenters were left hoping another experimental subject as talented as he and Ingo Swann would come along. Fortunately, Joe McMoneagle arrived on the scene. He was initially discovered on the basis of a profile of individuals who might be good remote viewing subjects put together by the military. At the time McMoneagle was a senior projects officer for the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. In a series of interviews where he was questioned about his attitude concerning possible paranormal forms of knowing, he indicated he was neither a believer or a scoffer, but if such things existed they could pose a serious security threat. He was flown to California, and after passing preliminary remote viewing experiments with flying colors, began an 18-year career as a remote viewer in a secret Army project that came to be called Star Gate.
Puthoff described one of the most impressive of McMoneagle’s remote viewing ventures as follows. In the fall of 1979 Puthoff’s team was given a photo of a massive, industrial-type building, some distance from a large body of water, located somewhere in Russia. The U. S. government didn’t know what the building was, what it was used for, or what its strategic importance was. McMoneagle was given only the geographic coordinates. He immediately said that they identified a very cold wasteland with an extremely large industrial-looking building that had enormous smokestacks, not far from a sea covered with a thick cap of ice. Since his impression closely matched the photograph, he was asked what might be going on inside the building.
In his remote viewing session McMoneagle described imagining himself drifting down into a building easily the size of two or three huge shopping centers, all under a single roof. He described what looked like cigars of different sizes, sitting in gigantic racks in giant bays. Everywhere were thick mazes of scaffolding and interlocking steel pipes. What appeared to be two huge cylinders were being welded side to side forming what he had an overwhelming sense was going to be a really big submarine with twin hulls. After the session he did a very detailed drawing of the submarine, adding dimensions, as well as noting the slanted tubes, indicating eighteen to twenty in all. This material along with the typed transcript of his session was forwarded to the NSC
Soon thereafter McMoneagle was asked to return to the site and to try to provide an estimated time of completion. He revisited the site and, based on the speed of construction and the differences in the condition of the submarine from one session to the next, guessed that it would be ready for launch about four months later. This would put it in January which seemed a singularly crazy time of year to launch a submarine from a building not connected to water, near a sea frozen over with ice yards thick. In mid- January of 1980 satellite photographs showed a new canal running alongside the facility and out to the sea. A two-hulled submarine with twenty canted missile tubes was clearly evident in the photographs. This turned out to be the first in an entirely new class of submarine, the largest ever built, and named the Typhoon.
McMoneagle performed a number of other functions for the project in addition to that of remote viewer and in 1984 was awarded the Legion of Merit by the U.S. government for distinguished service including his instrumental efforts “in developing a new revolutionary intelligence project.” In the certificate which accompanied the award McMoneagle was credited with “the execution of missions for the highest echelons of our military and government, including such national level agencies as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), NSA (National Security Agency), CIA, and Secret Service, producing critical intelligence unavailable from any other source”.
During the years remote viewing work was being carried out at SRI articles describing the results were published in prominent scientific journals including Nature and the Proceedings of the IEEE, as well as in a few popular books. This generated criticism that the researchers used to continually tighten their experimental design. Strict guidelines resulted for eliminating any possibility that factors other than clairvoyance might account for the results, including rules such as (1) no one who knew the identity of the target should have any contact with the remote viewer until after his or her description of the target had been safely secured; (2) no one who knew about the target or whether the session was successful should have any contact with the judge until after the judging had been completed; and (3) no one who knew about the target should have access to the remote viewer’s responses until after the judging had been completed.
The method of evaluating results utilized rank-order judging, a procedure that had been used in the dream psi studies. First, a pool of five possible targets was created of the following type: a geographic site, photograph, video clip, or hidden object. One was randomly selected to be the actual target and remote viewed by the subject who recorded her impressions consisting of a verbal description and sketch. These were then given to a judge along with photographs or videos of the five possible targets. With no awareness of which was the actual target, he was asked to rank each of the five possibilities in terms of how well it matches the viewer’s impressions.
In 1988 May analyzed all the psi experiments that had been conducted at SRI since 1973 which involved 154 experiments consisting of more than 26,000 separate trials. Just over a thousand of those trials were laboratory remote-viewing tests. The statistical results revealed odds against chance of a billion billion to one. However, this analysis appeared in an internal report that was not made public for some years
Between 1989 and 1993 the government sponsored psi research carried out at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) that involved a rigorously controlled set of ten experiments, six of which involved remote viewing, supervised by a distinguished oversight committee of experts from a variety of scientific disciplines. Because the earlier SRI studies had established the existence of remote viewing to the satisfaction of most of the government sponsors, the SAIC experiments were not designed to prove its existence but to try to gain some insight into how it operates.
In 1995 at the request by President Clinton for more open government, the CIA declassified a massive number of documents describing the remote-viewing research. A myriad of accounts describing the history of the Stargate Project soon appeared, some sober appraisals from those involved, and some more sensational with little grounding in fact. For the first time Puthoff and May were able to go public about the involvement of the CIA, the DIA, and the Department of Defense in their work.
In that same year the CIA commissioned a review of the government sponsored remote viewing research, primarily those experiments conducted at SAIC, but also to include a review of the SRI studies to see if the SAIC experiments replicated the earlier experiments. In its official assessment of the 23-year remote viewing program what was reported appeared was starkly contradictory to prior reports to say the least. In fact, the investigation conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) forcefully discredited the government-sponsored remote-viewing research done by SRI International and by SAIC. It concluded with a statement to the press that “there was no case in which ESP (remote viewing) had ever been used to guide intelligence operations.” Clearly that is very different from a number of other documented observations including the statements in the Legion of Merit award for Joe McMoneagle (Mayer, 2007).
The key players from Project Star Gate immediately issued criticisms of the report. In an article in the 1996 Journal of Scientific Exploration, which published a series of articles addressing the controversy, Star Gate director Ed May questioned the validity of CIA/AIR’S conclusions. He noted such serious problems with their evaluation methodology that he had become convinced that
“their conclusions were set before the investigation began and that methodological and administrative choices were made to assure that the results of the investigation would support the CIA’s pre-determined perspective”
May went on to provide a blow-by-blow account of scientific failure on the part of the CIA/AIR evaluation claiming that the evaluators had been instructed to examine radically incomplete data sets, directed to exclude a wide range of experiments and backup reports that might have challenged their eventual negative findings, that a significant proportion of the evaluators were known to have an anti-ESP bias, that they made deliberate decisions not to interview a number of crucial participants and ignored previous program reviews, and that they used the National Research Council’s negative review of parapsychology as the basis for their review.
May was particularly surprised that statistician Jessica Utts, a major contributor to the AIR evaluation, didn’t mention her difficulties with the NRC report on the ganzfeld research. When directly questioned about this, Utts told May that she had been asked by the AIR staff not to mention the NRC report. She had thought it had been forgotten about and was very surprised at the prominent weight it was subsequently given in AIR’s evaluation of remote viewing. She also informed May that she had been directed to not personally have any direct contact with a number of key remote viewing figures who May had told her about including a former DIA project officer, a former senior DIA official, a military general who had program responsibility, and Joseph McMoneagle.
In her background report in the AIR evaluation Utts expressed an unequivocal conclusion that anomalous cognition is possible and has been demonstrated. The phenomenon, she believed has been replicated in a number of forms across laboratories and cultures. “No one who has examined all of the data across laboratories, taken as a collective whole, has been able to suggest methodological or statistical problems to explain the ever-increasing and consistent results to date.”
Mayer, E. (2007). Extraordinary Knowing.