Chapter 7

Remote Viewing

From Miracles of Mind
by Russell Targ and Jane Katra, with a Commentary byHaroldPuthoff.

 

For a phenomenon thought in many circles not to exist, we certainly know a great deal about how to increase and decrease its accuracy and reliability.

Accuracy and Reliability of Remote Viewing:

Finding the target: Remote viewers can often contact, experience and describe a hidden object, or a remote natural or architectural site, based on the presence of a cooperative person at the location, geographical coordinates, or some other target demarcation, which we call an address. We have shown that it is not necessary for someone to know the correct answer at the time of the viewing. For example, in precognitive remote viewing, the target may not even be chosen at the time of the experimental trial, but of course, the viewer will get to see the feedback later.

Target attributes most often sensed:

Shape, form and color are described much more reliably by inexperienced viewers than the target's function, or other analytical information. In addition to visual imagery, viewers sometimes describe associated feelings, sounds, smells and even electrical or magnetic fields. As a viewer, I have learned that if I see a color clearly and brightly, or something silver and shiny, that is the aspect of the target that I am most likely to describe correctly.

It is even possible for viewers to experience aspects of a target which are not actually manifested. For example, some viewers can reliably describe the color of an object which is inside an opaque box where there is no light to give it any color at all.

Temporal sensing:

Viewers can sense present, past and future activities at target sites. In 1982, nine remote viewing forecasts were made four days in advance for changes in the price of silver futures on the COMEX commodity exchange, and all nine were correct. There is not a drop of evidence to indicate that it is more difficult to look slightly into the future, than it is to describe an object in a box in front of you. Actually, it's better not to look at the box when you are doing remote viewing, because you may be tempted to try to see the target by pretending that you have x-ray vision, which, in our experience, does not work.

It is not proven, but I believe that it is easier to describe a target that you will see in the near future, than one you will see many days in the future. It may be a purely psychological effect. If my feedback is delayed by a week or more, then I have somewhat forgotten what my description felt like to me. As a result, the feedback, which is supposed to be the source of that earlier perception, will have less of an impact on me, thereby decreasing the quality of the viewing. The idea that a later event is the cause of an earlier perception is a confusing though very important concept.

Accuracy and reliability:

Blueprint accuracy can sometimes be achieved, and reliability in a series can be as high as 80%. Unlike card-guessing or other forced-choice experiments, more than two decades of remote viewing research have shown no decline in people's remote viewing performance over time. With practice, people become increasingly able to separate out the psychic signal from the mental noise of memory and imagination.

Spatial accuracy:

Targets and target details as small as 1 mm can be sensed. Hella Hammid successfully described microscopic picture targets as small as one millimeter square in an experimental series at SRI in 1979.[1] She also correctly identified a silver pin and a spool of thread inside an aluminum film can.

In the 1890s, Annie Besant worked with psychic C. W. Leadbeater in an imaginative study to describe the structure of atoms. In this early research at the English Theosophical Society, Leadbeater was the first person in the world to describe the distinctive nuclear structure of the three isotopes of hydrogen. In his book Occult Chemistry published in 1898, he wrote that he clairvoyantly saw that a given atom of hydrogen could have one, two, or three particles in its nucleus, and still be hydrogen. Isotopes had not yet been discovered by chemists. Leadbeater was the first to report that atoms of different atomic weights could still retain their chemical identity. [2]

Distance effects:

Again and again we have seen that accuracy and resolution of remote viewing targets are not sensitive to variations in distance of up to 10,000 miles. An example of such long-distance viewing is described in Chapter 2 with Djuna Davitashvili in the 1984 Moscow - San Francisco remote viewing.

Electrical shielding:

Faraday-cage screen rooms and underwater shielding have no negative effects on remote viewing. In fact, some viewers very much like to work in an electrically-shielded environment. The well-known psychic Eileen Garrett showed me such a room that she had built for her own use, in her offices at the Parapsychology Foundation, on 57th Street in New York City. Pat Price did his fine description of the Rinconada Park Swimming Pool Complex and several other sites from inside SRI's shielded room. In fact, recent findings from Physicist James Spottiswoode** show that electromagnetic radiation from our milky way galaxy and the electromagnetic effects of solar flares both degrade psychic functioning. Electrical shielding seems to help performance, and so does carrying out experiments when the galactic radiation is at a minimum at your location. When the milky way is below your position of the earth, rather than above your head, you have a two hour window of opportunity. This occurs at 1300 hours sidereal time, but it is still possible to be abundantly psychic any time of the day or night.

In 1978, Hella Hammid and Ingo Swann successfully received messages sent from Palo Alto, while they were inside of a submarine submerged in 500 feet of sea water, 500 miles away.[3] Hella and Ingo each had five file cards to look at later, with a target location description written on one side, and a submarine type of instruction on the other, as a sort of code device. For example, the five targets were a large oak tree, an indoor shopping plaza, etc.; and the messages were the kind of thing you might communicate to a submerged sub that was out of radio contact because of the salt water, such as, "Remain submerged, Return to port, Fire at priority targets," etc. In each case my colleague and I would hide ourselves in Palo Alto at a specified time, and the viewers in the sub would have to describe the location where we were. They would then look at each of the five cards to see which one best matched their remote viewing experience, and the message to be sent was found on the back of the card. Both trials in this experiment were successful. (The statistical significance would be found by multiplying together the two 1-in-5 events, to give a probability of p = 0.04, or less than four times in a hundred occurring by chance, which many would consider a significant result.)

Factors that inhibit remote viewing:

A prior knowledge of target possibilities, absence of feedback, and use of mental analysis all inhibit remote viewing. Any visual or audio distractions, or anything novel in the working environment will tend to show up in the viewer's pictures in the remote viewing session. Numbers are much more difficult to perceive than pictorial targets. For example, it is much more difficult to guess the number from 1 to 10, than it is to describe the location chosen from an infinitude of planetary locations that you have never seen before. In looking for the geographical target, you apparently search your interior mental landscape for a surprise, and that will usually be the correct answer. With a number target, there are no surprises, since you are already familiar with all the possibilities, and you are apt to try to use analysis to rule out the various choices.

Factors that enhance remote viewing:

Seriousness of purpose, feedback, heart-to-heart trust among participants, and acceptance of psi all enhance remote viewing. Experienced viewers learn to improve their performance by becoming aware of their mental noise from memory and imagination, and filtering it out; and by writing down their impressions, and drawing their mental pictures. Drawing is especially important because it gives you direct access to your unconscious processes.

Multiple viewers to improve performance:

The use of several remote viewers can sometimes bring additional information or different points of view. However, it is more likely that the viewers all describe the same wrong target. If individual viewers each have their own target set, this problem can very likely be overcome. The experiment we describe in Chapter 5 successfully demonstrates this.

Technological considerations:

There are more than a hundred published reports suggesting that people are able to psychically affect the normally equal distribution of 1's and 0's from a random number generator. We believe that it is unclear from the present data, whether viewers can perturb the electronic equipment by their mental processes, or whether they use their ESP abilities to choose an optimal moment to start an experiment. Every long string of randomly generated 1's and 0's will contain a subset of statistically significant departures from balanced distribution. A psychic person might easily use his ESP to start his experimental test by buying into a naturally occurring deviant sequence, and not have to create it psychokinetically.

Edwin May and James Spottiswoode have written extensively on this subject, and throw into question the existence of any psychokinetic (i.e. mind affecting matter) phenomena that is part of a repetitive experimental series. Abraham Maslow, the famous psychologist, would call this optimal starting, "good choosing." May and Spottiswoode call it "decision augmentation." [4]

Theoretical considerations:

It appears clear to us that viewers can focus their attention on distant points in space-time and then describe and experience that distant location. Feedback is essential for learning, but is not necessary for psi functioning. It is as though the viewer is examining his or her own small, low-resolution, local piece of the four-dimensional space-time hologram in which he or she is embedded. This concept is based on the work of physicist David Bohm, and is discussed in his physics text book.

1. Puthoff, H.E., Targ, R., & Tart, C.T. (1980). "Resolution in remote viewing studies." in Research in Parapsychology 1979. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.

2. Leadbeater, C. W. (1898). Occult Chemistry. London: Theosophical Society.

3. Targ, Russell, May, E. C., and Puthoff, H. E. (1979). "Direct perception of remote geographic locations." in Mind At Large: Proc. of IEEE symposia on Extrasensory Perception. New York: Praeger.

4. May, Edwin. C., Spottiswoode, James and Utts, Jessica (September, 1995). Decision augmentation theory: Toward a model of anomalous mental phenomena. J. Parapsychology, 59, p.195-221.

**

Commentary forwarded by Victor Martinez:

www.earthtech.org/ 

www.espresearch.com/ 


PSI-SPY SPOOK WORLD:  A LANDMARK, GROUND-BREAKING BOOK ABOUT SCIENTIFIC
REMOTE VIEWING FROM THE 1970s, "Mind-Reach: Scientists Look At Psychic
Abilities" HAS BEEN REISSUED WITH PREVIOUSLY CIA/NATIONAL SECURITY
MATERIAL CLASSIFIED AS 'ABOVE TOP SECRET - MAJIC EYES ONLY' ADDED!


Publishing Data:  MIND-REACH: SCIENTISTS LOOK AT PSYCHIC ABILITIES -
By Drs Harold E Puthoff & Russell E Targ, Hampton Roads Publishing
Company, February © 2005, ISBN# 1571744142, $16.95 / National Release
Date: Valentine's Day, Monday, February 14, 2005 / Available NOW at: 


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1571744142/qid=1107288602/sr=1-11/ref=sr_1_11/102-1281689-3282544?v=glance&s=books


Publisher's Note: The older and first version from Delacorte Press in
1977 is also available from www.amazon.com, BUT does NOT contain any of
the classified information the updated 2005 edition has.
 
Publisher's Abstract & Press Release:

MIND-REACH: SCIENTISTS LOOK AT PSYCHIC ABILITIES - by Targ &
Puthoff
PREFACE

Remote viewing: "A human perceptual ability to access, by mental means
alone, information blocked from normal perception by distance,
shielding, or time."

That is the subject of this book.
             
What can now be told is that for more than two decades it was also the
subject of an intense government effort fueled by Cold War concerns as
to whether there was a credible threat to the United States from a
known, similar large-scale effort being pursued in the then Soviet
Union.

The story told here is how that program came to be. In response to a
request from the CIA, we tell how we initiated and built up the remote
viewing program at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International)
to both serve a number of clients in the intelligence and DoD
(Department of Defense) communities, and to generate a dense data base
for scientific evaluation.

As time went on, the research effort described in the following pages
evolved into a highly-classified, special-access program carried out
under such codeword project names as SCANATE, PHOENIX, STUNT PILOT, SUN
STREAK, CENTER LANE, GRILL FLAME and STAR GATE.

These names, and the program efforts they covered, only became public
knowledge beginning in 1995 as the Cold War wound down and a
declassification effort was mounted based on President Clinton's
Executive Order Nr. 1995-4-17, entitled Classified National Security
Information. That Executive Order reversed to some degree the maxim
"when in doubt, keep it CLASSIFIED."�

On September 6, 1995, the CIA Public Affairs Office publicly admitted
for the first time their involvement in setting up the program in a
release entitled, "CIA Statement on Remote Viewing."� And now, some
90,000 pages of documentation on the two-decade-plus program have been
declassified and are available, both at the National Archives and
Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland, and by purchase
of a 14-CD "Star Gate Collection"� from the Information and Privacy
Coordinator, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C. 20505.


Despite the increasing constraints brought on by the classified aspects
of the program, we struggled to obtain permission to provide to both the
scientific community and the lay public as much as we could about remote
viewing and related phenomena. This book, and our first scientific
publications in Nature [1] and in the Proceedings of the IEEE [2]
(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), are the result of
that struggle.

And as a result of this open publication, other laboratories soon became
interested in the work, set up their own programs and independently
replicated the experiments. One example, now in operation for more
than two decades, is the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research
Laboratory established by the Dean of Engineering, Robert Jahn. [3]
             
Now, with the release of certain of the classified aspects of the
program, we can "break the code" of some of what the reader finds
here. Chapter 1 begins with a remote viewing by Ingo Swann of a site
3000 miles away from our Menlo Park, California laboratory in response
to a request by a "skeptical colleague of ours on the East Coast."�
Read, "CIA officer monitoring the project." In Chapter 3 we describe
remote viewer Pat Price's result when targeted on the same site. The
site described turned out to be a sensitive government installation.

In an evaluation of this 1973 experiment, finally declassified in 1996,
we find the CIA project officer stating that Pat Price, who had no
military or intelligence background, provided a list of project titles
associated with current and past activities including one of extreme
sensitivity. Also, the code-name of the site was provided. Other
information concerning the physical layout of the site was accurate.
�[4]

That result generated an intense and significant response from the
intelligence community as they attempted to determine how the
information might have been obtained by more prosaic means. What
helped to settle the issue at that point was the generation of similar
results when, in response to tasking, we had our remote viewers target
on Soviet facilities.

(The first Soviet site Price was targeted against was an unidentified
R&D facility at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. He claimed to see a
"damned big crane"� where a person only came up to the axles on the
wheels. He drew the sketch shown in the accompanying photo which can
be compared with an artist's conception derived from satellite photos.
He then went on to describe correctly other aspects of the site and
its activities.)

Again, the vignette described at the end of Chapter 7 concerning an
'East Coast Colleague' who was collecting information about the
different scientists who had worked with Uri� (Geller) was yet another
CIA officer. Similarly for our "skeptical government visitor"� in
Chapter 1 who agreed to be a subject in a series of three of our
standard remote viewing experiments and who rendered the merry-go-round
result shown in Figure 2. And so it went.
             
We found that leading this double life, scientists in the "White
World,"� intelligence providers in the "Black World,"� was not
without its ironies. Once, while making a presentation to a small
select group at CIA on some excellent results recently obtained on an
operational target, one of the attendees suddenly leaped up from his
chair and exclaimed, "Wait a minute; I know what's going on! This is a
psychological test of our gullibility, and I want whoever is taking
notes to know I'm not buying it!" And he stomped out of the room.
(We continued with our briefing.)

When dealing with our public skeptics we often felt like those
scientists before us who experienced skepticism from their unwitting
colleagues for their belief in the possibility of an atomic bomb while,
meanwhile, they were preparing to detonate one in the New Mexico desert.
             
On the other hand, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the higher
the level of the officials that we briefed (and this included
congressmen, military leaders, National Security Council staff, and
various Agency Directors), the more acceptance there seemed to be.
Perhaps the intuitive capacities of high-functioning executives
predispose them to be more open to the concept of extraordinary human
functioning.

Certainly it makes them more enthusiastic for practical applications of
such functioning, if verified. Or there may be some support for the
idea often expressed in psi research that those who make it to the top
in our hierarchical societal structure may, at least unconsciously, tap
into psi reserves of their own when they have to make key decisions
based on insufficient data.

In any case, the phenomena we were describing seemed time and time again
to have struck a resonant chord in these upper echelons. With the
passage of time many of the details of the classified aspects of the
program have become public knowledge, sometimes from surprising
sources.

For example, in response to a question from a student while giving a
speech at a university, ex-President Jimmy Carter revealed an incident
that we thought would never see the light of day. A Soviet plane went
down in Zaire, and spy satellites failed to locate the wreckage. CIA
Director Admiral Stansfield Turner then turned to remote viewers who
found the plane, and agents on the ground were dispatched to the
location in a successful recovery mission.

In other tests carried out by CIA personnel, Price was successful in
describing the interiors and locating the coderooms in two foreign
embassies. The operations officer concluded, 'It is my considered
opinion that this technique 'whatever it is' offers definite operational
possibilities." �[5]
             
As a result of our successes, we were tasked with developing a training
program for the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) at Ft.
Meade, Maryland. Several intelligence officers went through this
program and went on to use their newfound skills in operational
applications. As recently as 2001, an assessment of the use of remote
viewing under asymmetric warfare conditions was the topic of a Marine
War College thesis. [6]
             
Eventually, as the program expanded in response to additional
funding/tasking from the Army, Navy, Air Force and various elements of
the intelligence community, the entire effort was consolidated under the
aegis of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Further discussion of
the now declassified aspects of the program and its evaluation can be
found in scholarly journals [7] and books [8] and in memoirs written by
the participants.
             
However, the true significance of the program lies in the broader
issues:
             
- Just how such a large-scale, multi-year, multimillion dollar program
as the one described here could get started and survive in a skeptical
if not outright hostile milieu of modern government, corporate and
public sectors of society; [9] 

- What remote viewing is, and its characteristic strengths and
weaknesses; 
- How remote viewing relates to our current scientific paradigm;  

- The courageous personalities of the first visionary remote viewers
involved; 

- The response of both scientists and the public at large; 

- And its importance for our understanding of human capabilities.

It's ALL here, TOLD FIRSTHAND by the authors of this book as events
unfolded in modern circumstances during a new look at an ageless
phenomenon.
             
Despite the ambiguities inherent in the type of exploration carried out
in our program and described in detail in this book, the integrated
results attest to unequivocal evidence of A HUMAN CAPACITY TO ACCESS
EVENTS remote in space and time, however falteringly, BY SOME COGNITIVE
PROCESS NOT YET UNDERSTOOD. This leaves us with the conviction that
this fact must be taken into account in any attempt to develop an
unbiased picture of the structure of reality.
             
Perhaps one of the most encouraging statements ever made to us occurred
at the conclusion of A HIGHLY CLASSIFIED BRIEFING we gave to a
congressional intelligence committee. We were approached afterwards
by one of the congressmen who said: "Although I see why we must PURSUE
THIS AS A MATTER OF NATIONAL SECURITY, what is truly most significant
about these studies is what they tell us about the human potential."
�

             
Harold E. Puthoff, Ph.D., Quantum Physicist
Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin
4030 W Braker Lane  #300
Austin, Texas   78759-5333-30 
www.earthtech.org/   
November 2004   


[1] R. Targ and H. E. Puthoff, "Information Transmission under
Conditions of Sensory Shielding," Nature, vol. 252, pp. 602-607 (October
18, 1974). 
 
[2] H. E. Puthoff and R. Targ, "Perceptual Channel for Information
Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent
Research,"� Proc. IEEE, vol. 64, pp. 329-354 (March 1976). 

[3] R. G. Jahn, "The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An
Engineering Perspective," Proc. IEEE, vol. 70, pp. 136-170 (1982).
See also R. G. Jahn and B. J. Dunne, Margins of Reality (Harcourt, Brace
and Jovanovich, New York, 1987).

[4] K. A. Kress, "Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review and
Conclusions," Studies in Intelligence, CIA (Winter, 1977).
(Declassified, 1996.)

[5] Ibid.

[6] Cdr. L. R. Bremseth, USN, "Unconventional Human Intelligence
Support: Transcendent and Asymmetric Warfare Implications of Remote
Viewing,"� Marine Corps War College, Quantico, VA (2001). 

[7] See, e.g., vol. 10, No. 1, of the Journal of Scientific Exploration,
1996. 

[8] Mind at Large, ed. C. Tart, H. E. Puthoff and R. Targ, (Hampton
Roads Publ. Co., Charlottesville, VA, 2002).

[9] One reviewer of our IEEE paper (Ref. 2) was reported to have said:
"This is the kind of thing that I would not believe in, even if it
existed!"� Before the paper was accepted for publication, the
Editor, Robert W. Lucky, had us make a presentation to the engineering
staff of Bell Laboratories to gauge reaction,... it was positive!

 

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1571744142/qid=1107288602/sr=1-11/ref=sr_1_11/102-9254802-2376942?v=glance&s=books