Remote Viewing

About Remote Viewing

Remote viewing is a structured perceptual protocol in which a trained subject attempts to describe a target, person, place, or object that is separated from them by distance, shielding, or time, using only mental impressions. The term was coined at Stanford Research Institute in 1972 by physicists Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ, who wanted a neutral label free of the associations carried by clairvoyance and second sight. Funding came first from the Central Intelligence Agency, then from the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army Intelligence and Security Command, and several private donors, under a succession of code names that ended with Star Gate.

The defining feature is the protocol. A monitor selects a target without the viewer knowing what it is. The viewer sits in a quiet room with pen and paper and records spontaneous impressions, ideograms, and sketches following a specific sequence of stages. Results are then compared to the actual target, often by independent judges blind to which session matches which target. The goal was to separate any real signal from imagination, sensory leakage, and confirmation bias.

Ingo Swann, a New York artist who trained at SRI from 1972, was the principal co-developer of the method that became Coordinate Remote Viewing. Pat Price, a former Burbank police commissioner, produced the most striking early hits, including a 1974 description of a suspected Soviet weapons facility at Semipalatinsk that matched later satellite imagery. Joe McMoneagle, designated Remote Viewer Number One in the Army's Grill Flame unit at Fort Meade from 1979, served for years and received the Legion of Merit in 1984 for intelligence work produced through the protocol.

The program ran through three sponsoring agencies and four code names, Scanate, Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, and Star Gate, until 1995 when the CIA assumed custody, commissioned an independent review, and closed the unit. Tens of thousands of pages of internal documents were declassified and released to the National Archives, giving researchers a rare window into a government-funded parapsychology program and into the question of whether the mind can sometimes get information by means physics does not yet recognize.

The Ability

Remote viewing, as developed at SRI and later refined by instructors outside the classified program, refers to a specific protocol rather than a spontaneous gift. The viewer is asked to describe a target identified only by a random number or sealed envelope. The target might be a geographic site selected from a pool, a hidden object in a box, a photograph sealed in an opaque envelope, or an event that has not yet occurred. The viewer knows none of these details at the start of the session.

Phenomenologically, practitioners describe the experience as fragmentary and preverbal. Impressions arrive first as simple gestalts, land, water, structure, motion, then as textures, colors, and emotional tones, then as specific features such as the shape of a building or the number of people at a site. Ingo Swann insisted that accuracy depended on catching these early impressions before the analytic mind filled them in with guesses, a failure he called analytic overlay or AOL. Viewers are trained to note AOL in the margin and return to the raw signal.

Several named protocols emerged. Coordinate Remote Viewing, developed by Swann with Puthoff from 1981 to 1983 under a Defense Intelligence Agency contract, walks the viewer through six stages, from basic gestalts to detailed sketches and analytic summaries. Extended Remote Viewing, favored by Joe McMoneagle, uses a hypnagogic state closer to sleep, with the viewer reclining and letting imagery arise in the drifting edge of consciousness. Controlled Remote Viewing, codified later by Paul H. Smith and Lyn Buchanan, is a civilian descendant of CRV with added emphasis on structure and training drills. Associative Remote Viewing couples the perceptual task to a future outcome, most often a binary, so that the viewer describes one of two sealed targets and the matching target is later assigned by a real event such as a silver price change or a sports result.

Targets vary by purpose. In SRI's scientific phase, most targets were geographic sites chosen from a pool of 100 locations within driving distance of Menlo Park, California, with a separate outbound team visiting the selected site. In the operational phase at Fort Meade, targets included suspected Soviet installations, hostage locations, and missing aircraft. Joe McMoneagle reports having worked on cases involving the kidnapping of Brigadier General James Dozier in 1981 and the crash of a Soviet Tu-95 in Africa in 1979, although his hit rate across hundreds of sessions was closer to fifteen to twenty percent usable intelligence than to reliable precision.

Accurate sessions tend to share specific features. They describe structural gestalts and spatial relationships rather than fine text or proper names. They often include small sensory details that would be hard to guess, the feel of wind, the angle of sunlight, the hum of machinery, while missing the overall identity of the site. They sometimes shift temporally, describing how the site looked years earlier or later. This last feature is part of what drew researchers toward the adjacent question of precognition, which remote viewing sessions seemed to touch in ways that were difficult to remove from the protocol.

Training Method

Training in remote viewing, as practiced at SRI and in the civilian lineages that followed, rests on four pillars, a clean protocol, a strict vocabulary, a quiet physiological baseline, and thousands of supervised practice trials. The method is closer to radar operator school than to meditation retreat, although quiet attention is a prerequisite.

Prerequisites are modest. Trainees need the ability to sit still for an hour, write legibly under quiet stress, draw simple shapes without self-editing, and tolerate frequent failure. SRI screened candidates for an artistic or intuitive orientation and for what Puthoff called a willingness to report what seems silly. Sceptics could train successfully but tended to quit when early results looked like noise. Meditation experience was not required, although many of the most effective viewers, including Swann and McMoneagle, maintained a long daily practice that stabilized attention under fatigue.

Coordinate Remote Viewing training proceeds through six graded stages. Stage One works with ideograms, the spontaneous pencil mark that comes when the viewer first hears the target coordinate. The student learns to read the ideogram for its basic gestalt, land, water, structure, motion. Stage Two asks for raw sensory data, color, temperature, texture, sound, smell. Stage Three introduces dimensional sketching of the target site. Stage Four opens analytic categories including energetics, emotionals, and aesthetic impact. Stage Five allows structured probing of specific features. Stage Six uses three-dimensional modeling in clay or paper. At every stage the instructor monitors the student for analytic overlay and trains them to log it in the margin rather than suppress it. Paul H. Smith's book Reading the Enemy's Mind (2005) gives the most detailed civilian account of the CRV curriculum as it was taught at Fort Meade in the 1980s.

Extended Remote Viewing training is less formal and more phenomenological. The viewer lies down, reaches a hypnagogic state in which imagery comes unbidden, then describes what appears without trying to interpret. McMoneagle teaches this method at the Monroe Institute in Virginia using the Hemi-Sync binaural audio developed by Robert Monroe, which he and the Army viewers used operationally. ERV sessions tend to be looser and more narrative, with the viewer moving through a site as though walking it. Controlled Remote Viewing, as taught by Lyn Buchanan at Problems Solutions Innovations in New Mexico and Paul H. Smith at Remote Viewing Instructional Services, is a structured civilian descendant that retains the CRV stage system and adds databasing of individual viewer strengths and blind spots.

Lineage matters. Swann trained the original Army unit in the early 1980s. Those viewers trained the next cohort. Several instructors active today can trace their teaching lineage directly back to Swann in a chain of three or four steps. Many civilian teachers who did not train at Fort Meade have assembled their own systems from the declassified manuals, and quality varies widely. Students who want a verifiable lineage generally look for a teacher who studied with Swann, Smith, Buchanan, McMoneagle, or Edwin May.

Progression is measured by blind trials. A disciplined student does between 300 and 1000 monitored practice sessions in the first two years, each judged against its target by an independent scorer. Accuracy usually rises for the first few hundred sessions, then plateaus, then rises again in smaller increments. SRI's house rule was that consistent work above chance on blind targets qualified a viewer as operational. Hit rates above fifty percent on simple targets were common among experienced viewers under good conditions. No one at SRI claimed one hundred percent accuracy. Skill could degrade under fatigue, emotional upset, and target sets that differed sharply from training sets, and the best viewers learned to refuse sessions when their internal state was poor.

Scientific Research

The scientific record on remote viewing is unusually rich for a parapsychological topic because much of it was funded by the United States government, published in mainstream journals at the time, and then declassified under the Freedom of Information Act. It is also contested, and the contested points are as instructive as the positive findings.

The SRI program began in late 1972 when Harold E. Puthoff, a laser physicist, invited the artist Ingo Swann to Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park for a pilot study. Early trials with hidden objects and then with geographic targets produced results that Puthoff and his colleague Russell Targ, also a physicist, considered statistically significant. Their paper Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding appeared in Nature in October 1974 (Vol. 251, pp. 602 to 607) and reported trials with Pat Price and Ingo Swann against geographic targets selected by an outbound experimenter. The paper was controversial from the day it was published, and Nature's editorial board included a rare commentary from the referees explaining why they had accepted it despite reservations.

The classified and operational phase ran in parallel. Under the names Scanate, Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak, and finally Star Gate, the program moved from CIA sponsorship to Defense Intelligence Agency sponsorship to Army Intelligence and Security Command, and back to CIA custody in 1995. The operational unit, based at Fort Meade in Maryland from 1979 onward, produced several thousand sessions against intelligence targets. When the CIA closed the program it commissioned an independent review from the American Institutes for Research. Two reviewers, Dr. Jessica Utts of the University of California at Davis, a statistician, and Dr. Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon, a psychologist and longtime sceptic, wrote separate opinions. Utts concluded that the laboratory evidence for an anomalous cognitive effect was statistically significant, consistent across experimenters, and not explained by known flaws. Hyman agreed that the statistical effect was real but argued that flaws or unknown causes could account for it. The 1995 AIR report and Utts's companion paper An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1996, remain the most cited documents in the debate.

Parallel to SRI, Edwin May took over the scientific side of the program in 1985 and continued it at Science Applications International Corporation and later at the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory. May's 2014 two-volume Anomalous Cognition, Emerging Perspectives (McFarland) collects many of the experimental papers and protocol refinements from this phase. May argued that statistical effects correlated with target features such as change in entropy rather than with distance or shielding, a finding that complicated any straightforward sensory explanation.

The ganzfeld experiments ran in parallel tracks and remain the cleanest laboratory paradigm for perception at a distance. Honorton's automated ganzfeld at Princeton produced the Honorton and Hyman 1986 joint communiqué in the Journal of Parapsychology agreeing on methodological standards. Daryl Bem and Charles Honorton's 1994 paper Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer, published in Psychological Bulletin (Vol. 115, pp. 4 to 18), reported a meta-analysis across eleven ganzfeld studies with a combined hit rate of about 32 percent against a 25 percent chance baseline, a difference with long odds against chance. Milton and Wiseman's 1999 meta-analysis in the same journal argued that the effect had not replicated in later studies, and Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio's 2010 update in Psychological Bulletin (Vol. 136, pp. 471 to 485) reported that including more recent trials brought the effect back.

Critics have pressed several methodological points. Ray Hyman argued that some SRI protocols allowed sensory cueing through target pool familiarity. Richard Wiseman raised related concerns about judging procedures. David Marks and Richard Kammann's 1980 book The Psychology of the Psychic charged that the Targ and Puthoff transcripts contained cues that allowed judges to match targets without psi. Targ and Puthoff contested these criticisms in subsequent papers and showed that similar results were obtained with blinded transcripts. The debate has not closed. What both sides agree on is that the SRI corpus contains statistically anomalous results, that the operational Fort Meade sessions include both striking hits and near misses, and that a full accounting requires more than dismissing the evidence.

Independent confirmation of the basic paradigm came from labs outside the classified program. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab, directed by Robert Jahn from 1979 to 2007, ran a long programme of remote perception studies alongside its random event generator work and reported small but consistent deviations from chance. The declassified CIA archive, released in 1995 and expanded to include roughly 12,000 documents, is searchable on the CIA's own website and has become a resource for both proponents and sceptics.

Risks & Cautions

Remote viewing is a relatively mild practice on the psychological scale of psychic disciplines, much closer to a concentration exercise than to kundalini work or tummo, but it carries a specific set of risks that are poorly understood by casual students and that can cause real harm when ignored.

The first risk is obsession with feedback. Because the protocol teaches the student to check every session against a known target, students can develop a compulsive relationship with their own hit rate. The cycle runs from excitement after a hit to despair after a miss to a narrowing of attention to scoring at the expense of the perceptual discipline that produced the hits. Experienced teachers including Joseph McMoneagle and Paul H. Smith warn that this pattern is the most common reason advanced students burn out and leave the field. The practical remedy is a long-term practice log, regular rest periods, and a teacher who enforces session limits.

A second risk is target contamination of ordinary life. Students who work for weeks on distressing targets such as crime scenes, crash sites, or conflict zones report intrusive imagery, nightmares, and emotional numbing that resemble vicarious trauma in first responders. This is not a mystical problem but a cognitive one, and it responds to the same countermeasures, clear start and stop rituals, separate physical spaces for sessions, limits on the number of heavy targets per week, and supervision by a trained debriefer. The Army Star Gate unit developed internal debrief procedures after several viewers showed symptoms of operational fatigue.

A third risk is the confusion of viewer signal with personal intuition. Once students have practiced protocol viewing for some months, they sometimes begin to trust every spontaneous impression in daily life as though it were a blind trial, and then make important decisions based on uncalibrated guesses. This overreach tends to end in bad choices about money, relationships, and health. Teachers in the CRV lineage insist that without feedback and protocol a hunch is just a hunch, and that disciplined viewers keep protocol and intuition clearly separate.

A fourth risk concerns people with psychotic spectrum vulnerabilities. Remote viewing trains the student to give credence to internal imagery and to take it seriously as potential external information. In someone with latent schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder this can loosen the already fragile boundary between inner and outer reality. Practitioners should not begin training during an active psychotic episode, and students with a personal or family history of psychotic illness should work only under the care of a clinician familiar with anomalous experiences.

A fifth risk is social and professional. Remote viewing carries stigma in academic, scientific, and corporate settings. Students who talk openly about their practice can face career consequences, lose friendships, and be pulled into fringe communities that reward dramatic claims over disciplined work. The declassification of the Star Gate documents has softened this risk but has not removed it.

Finally there is the risk of entanglement with intelligence or security work. The SRI program was entangled with intelligence operations for over two decades, and some former viewers have described the psychological cost of contributing to classified operations whose outcomes they could not see. Civilian students who are invited into similar work, whether for investigators, missing person cases, or private security, should think carefully about the demands it will place on them and about their own accountability for any decisions made on the basis of their sessions.

Significance

The significance of remote viewing lies less in any single dramatic hit than in what the program forced into the open. Between 1972 and 1995 the United States government spent roughly 20 million dollars investigating whether the mind can obtain information about distant or hidden targets by means that physics does not recognize. The program was run by physicists, vetted by statisticians, reviewed by intelligence officers, and then declassified. Whatever one concludes about the results, the history cannot be dismissed as the work of credulous amateurs.

Theoretically, remote viewing presses on the question of what information is and how it moves. Classical physics offers no mechanism by which a person in Menlo Park can describe a bunker in Semipalatinsk. Quantum mechanics offers correlations across distance, but not signalling of the kind that would allow perceptual reports. If the SRI data are what they appear to be, then either the data are not what they appear to be, which is the mainstream position, or physics is missing something fundamental about the relationship between mind, information, and space. Both possibilities are interesting.

Practically, the protocol made a contribution to the craft of structured intuition that can stand apart from the metaphysical question. The CRV stages train attention, pattern recognition, and the humility to note when the mind is confabulating, and these skills transfer to any task that depends on reading faint signals in noise. Intelligence analysts, investigators, and therapists have drawn on the methodology even when they remain agnostic about psi.

Culturally, the declassification of Star Gate in 1995 gave older traditions of distant perception, the Tibetan lta-stong, the shamanic journey, the Sufi kashf, and the Daoist yuan shen practices, a modern counterpart written in the language of protocols and statistics. For a school of life that draws on many traditions, this matters. It means that the claims of those traditions about distant seeing can be discussed without the usual bracketing and that the question of whether mind is larger than brain can be treated as an empirical as well as a contemplative one. Remote viewing is not the answer to that question. It is evidence that the question is still open.

Connections

Remote viewing sits inside a much wider web of distant-perception practices that Satyori treats as variations on a single theme. The Tibetan practice of clairvoyance as taught in Nyingma and Kagyu lineages cultivates similar faculties through shamatha stabilization and guru instruction, and the Star Gate viewers sometimes compared notes with Tibetan teachers during the later years of the program. The closely related skill of mind-to-mind contact is discussed in the telepathy entry, which covers the ganzfeld paradigm and its meta-analyses. When the viewer reports impressions of a time other than the present, the session shades into precognition, which became an unavoidable problem for SRI's experimental design.

The meditative ground for remote viewing in contemplative traditions overlaps with the preparatory stages of samadhi and the Buddhist jhana states, where steady attention on a single object is used to strip the mind of its habitual interference. The classical siddhis catalogued in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras include distant perception as a byproduct of samyama on particular objects. Students who come to viewing from a contemplative background often find that practices of trataka and vipassana stabilize the attention needed for clean sessions.

For the phenomenology of leaving the immediate location the practice is close to astral projection, although classical remote viewers took pains to distinguish between their protocol-driven mental imagery and the autoscopic experiences reported in out-of-body work. The Extended Remote Viewing approach developed by Joe McMoneagle at the Monroe Institute borrows directly from the hypnagogic methods that Robert Monroe used for out-of-body training. The allied phenomenon of being reported in two places at once appears in bilocation, which reaches similar questions from a Catholic and Sufi direction. Students interested in the cleaner physiological baseline needed for reliable work often draw on breath disciplines from nadi-shodhana and the cold-stress conditioning of wim hof method.

Further Reading