Remote Viewing: The CIA’s Secret Psychic Spy Program
Back in 1995 the CIA declassified a 20-year long secret spy program that used psychics! What was this program? Why was it declassified? Did it work? Why are we talking about this on a UFO podcast? We’ll dive into the answers to all those questions in this exciting episode!
What is Remote Viewing?
- Wikipedia: “Remote viewing is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen subject, purportedly sensing with the mind. A remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person, or location hidden from physical view and separated at some distance.”
- “Physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), are generally credited with coining the term ‘remote viewing’ to distinguish it from the closely related concept of clairvoyance.”
- “Clairvoyance refers to the paranormal ability to see persons and events that are distant in time or space. It can be divided into roughly three classes: precognition, the ability to perceive or predict future events, retrocognition, the ability to see past events, and traveling clairvoyance, aka remote viewing, the perception of contemporary events happening outside the range of normal perception.”
- “The idea of remote viewing received renewed attention in the 1990s upon the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the U.S. government that ran from 1975 to 1995 and attempted to determine potential military applications of psychic phenomena.”
- “The program ended after evaluators concluded that remote viewers consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence information. There is no scientific evidence that remote viewing exists, and the topic of remote viewing is generally regarded as pseudoscience.”
Why are we talking about it on a UFO podcast?
- First, Lue Elizondo’s book is coming out soon. Word is that he was trained as a remote viewer, so it’s likely we’ll be talking about that in a future episode, and RV is a big enough topic that I didn’t want to derail that discussion.
- Second, UFO encounters often include psy phenomenon such as telepathic communication and reacting to thought and intention, such moving when asked, or being summoned via meditation protocols.
- Lastly, here’s a quote from Dean Radin, a scientist who worked in the Stargate project: “One of the things I learned in the program was on the outside of the building at SRI, the Stanford Research Institute, there was all this talk about ‘psychic whatever is nonsense, it doesn't exist, it's all fantasy.’ Inside the building and during our daily work, that's what we were studying. Well why was that split? The split is because the value of such a program is that everybody else thinks it's nonsense. Because then they're not looking at it. I kind of suspect that some of that has been going on in the UFO world too, that people make fun of it, and say there's nothing here, it's all nonsense, because it's a way of deflecting attention.”
Is there any evidence that Remote Viewing works?
- Dean Radin: “Remote viewing definitely works. For those who who hold the opinion that they got rid of the program because it didn't work, all you need to do is actually look at the the formal report that was written for the CIA to evaluate it, in which the conclusion was, well maybe it doesn't work well for operational missions, but the phenomenon exists. This was by Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman, who were on two sides of the argument there. Ray Hyman even admitted that the phenomenon looks like it's real, and Jessica of course said yeah I've looked at all the data it is real.”
- Jessica Utts, a statistician at UC Davis: “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.”
- Ray Hyman, a psychologist at the University of Oregon: “I want to state that we agree on many … points. We both agree that the experiments (being assessed) were free of the methodological weaknesses that plagued the early ... research. We also agree that the … experiments appear to be free of the more obvious and better known flaws that can invalidate the results of parapsychological investigations. We agree that the effect sizes reported … are too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes”
- Psi Encyclopedia: “This is important because what Hyman, a significant skeptical critic, was admitting was that the way in which remote viewing experiments were conducted, and the way in which they were analyzed, was no longer a matter for dispute. Remote viewing cannot be explained away as some artifact resulting from how the data were collected or evaluated.”
- AIR: “The foregoing observations provide a compelling argument against continuation of the program within the intelligence community. Even though a statistically significant effect has been observed in the laboratory … these conditions have limited applicability and utility for intelligence gathering operations. … The information provided by remote viewing is vague and ambiguous, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the technique to yield information of sufficient quality and accuracy of information for actionable intelligence. Thus, we conclude that continued use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering operations is not warranted.”
- Dean Radin: “The question is how useful it is. Do we want to spend what amounts to a million dollars a year to use something which is not as reliable as a spy satellite? The answer to that is we absolutely should be doing that, because a spy satellite costs a billion dollars or more, and here we're talking about one thousandth of that for an entire year to begin to learn more and more about the nature of this phenomena, to make it more reliable.”
How do you study something like Remote Viewing?
- Utts: “At the heart of any statistical method is a definition of what should happen ‘randomly’ or ‘by chance.’ Without a random mechanism, there can be no statistical evaluation. There is nothing random about the responses generated in anomalous cognition experiments; in other words, there is no way to define what they would look like ‘by chance.’ Therefore, the random mechanism in these experiments must be in the choice of the target. In that way, we can compare the response to the target and answer the question: ‘If chance alone is at work, what is the probability that a target would be chosen that matches this response as well as or better than does the actual target?’ In order to accomplish this purpose, a properly conducted experiment uses a set of targets defined in advance. The target for each remote viewing is then selected randomly, in such a way that the probability of getting each possible target is known.”
- The Psi Encyclopedia: “A remote viewing session is basically two people having a very focused conversation for a specific purpose, with one person—the monitor—asking questions and another—the viewer—responding to them.”
- “In an RV session a typical viewer task might be, ‘I will show you a target image tomorrow at 4pm. It is a location somewhere on planet Earth. Can you please describe it for me in as much detail as you can? I have no idea what the target is, nor has anyone else. It will be randomly selected by a computer at 4pm tomorrow.’ That is an example of a typical triple blind Precognition Protocol. At the time the session data was gathered, there was no target selected, and no one could know what it would be.”
- “Another use of this protocol was to pick the winner of a horse race. Different locations were assigned to the different horses running in a particular race, at a particular track. The viewers were told that at a certain time the next day they would be taken to a location and were asked to describe where that would be. Unbeknownst to the viewer, the horse race, run after the session data had been collected and judged, would determine the location to which they would be taken.”
- A review of multiple RV experiments like that one was conducted by Nantes University. “The results suggest that the mean scoring rate in a binary situation is around 63%. If these results could be confirmed this would falsify theories that predict that it is impossible to use psi in a consistent and robust way and moreover it could be the end of the financial problems in the field of psi research.”
What was Project Stargate?
- Dean Radin did some parapsychology research while working at Bell Labs, and after giving a talk on a precognition experiment, he was approached and invited to join the Stargate Program, which was still classified, but there were rumors about it, since SRI had published some papers on remote viewing.
- “I took a leave of absence from Bell Labs for the calendar year 1985. After I got my clearances, Hal Putoff, who was the director at the time, gave me the briefing that everyone gets when they go through this process. And that blew my mind because… some of it was experimental work, but some of it was also operational work… There was a program actually active where people were using this for operational purposes. So I saw examples of those operational missions and the results of them, and saw for the first time that if you're dealing with people with high talent, that you can get almost veridical drawing, like photographic drawings of things that nobody on our side of the pond knew, and yet turn out to later be verified through human intelligence and satellites and so on.”
- “The Stargate program was one of a whole bunch of programs. Stargate was just one code word. When I was on the program, it was called Grill Flame. That was the name of the code word at the time. And for those of you who know about classification levels, this was TS-SCI Special Access Program. This was way down in the deep black. You had to sign a book to know the existence of this thing, and even to know what the code word was, and what it meant. The reason for that was because there was overlap with the operational missions. Many times you go into the top secret world, when there are people and methods involved, if they became publicly known, their lives would be in danger, and the methods would no longer be useful.”
- “I got a chance to meet Ingo Swann and Joe McMoneagle and other people who are now well known for being quite good at this thing, and a bunch of other people who are still not very well known but were about as good. So there's a cadre of perhaps a dozen people who were remarkably skilled.”
- “I was working on precognition tests and I would say most of what I was doing was involved in threat analysis. If there's one thing that gets the government excited about something, just as with UFOs as we're seeing now, if there is a potential threat, then people get nervous and start allocating money to study this thing.”
- “Threat assessment was a big piece of it, and that meant looking at claims from publications that we would get out of China or out of the Soviet Union at the time, and even claims that we saw from the open press or open literature. Could we believe this or not, Is this a threat? Sometimes it would advance to the point where we would try to replicate one of the claims, like redo the experiment, and sometimes you could and sometimes you couldn't.”
Why did Project Stargate fail?
- CIA: “Since the DoD became involved with supporting psi research, a large number of attempts have been made to apply remote viewing to solve intelligence problems. The DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, has regularly tasked SRI to gather information on real events that were of intelligence interest. The Army has an "operational unit" at Fort Meade. They received many requests for intelligence information and responded to many and varied customers. All of this has been done without any attention being placed on the problem of how do you go from a research program to an operational capability? Until this is investigated, we should not expect huge successes on operational tasks. A prime example of the difficulty you encounter is that many of the operational tasks required search remote viewing (where is this object) while all of the research was on site remote viewing (what is at this location).”
- “The principle pitfall of doing operational remote viewing the way it is currently done is that we present a facade of a capability that we do not have. We are then judged, by the customer, on this basis. Never is it explained that we are responding due to the urgency of the situation (Beirut hostages) and that we are not claiming to have a proven, in place operational capability. In addition, when we attempt to apply psi abilities there is often not enough research to support our efforts. For instance, the Army puts their remote viewers through a training program and then calls them operational remote viewers. However, they have no evidence that the training program accomplishes what it claims. They also train their operational viewers in-house. They provide this training without conducting any research on the numerous and varied aspects of psi ability or training techniques.”
- “At present there are two groups who do operational remote viewing. The first group is a rather diffuse unit. It consists of a variety of people who are associated with SRI. It includes consultants, sub-contractors and people with good performance records in remote viewing. The problems are that they are widely scattered (coast to coast), they may not be available, it requires time to assemble them (time is often very critical and there is no facility in which to work. So what happens is we scurry around, pull in whoever we can as fast as we can and present the problem. If maps or documents are needed, they may or may not be available. In addition, funds to mount an operational effort must be taken from other tasks. In summary, this group is not a group standing by to do operational remote viewing and SRI is not set up to acquire intelligence information. This is all thrown together using whatever resources are available whenever a problem arises. This is certainly admirable on the part of both SRI and the various remote viewers but it is not the best way to acquire accurate data through application of remote viewing.”
- “The second operational group is the unit at Ft. Meade. It consists of Army personnel who were selected and trained to do remote viewing. Their problems are that no selection criteria were available and they were submitted to an unevaluated training program which was completed by only one member who has now left the unit. Whereas the SRI group is managed by scientists with extensive experience in understanding and researching psi phenomena, the Army group has no one associated with it who has any understanding of psi phenomena or experience in researching or utilizing remote viewing. Since they are unaware of what can or cannot be done they over sell their capability and attempt any problem presented to them by customers. They also have no method by which to evaluate what they have done and therefore are not in a position to direct applications research. While they have mounds of data it has not been synthesized in a manner that can depict their success or failure in the mission they are chartered to perform. Essentially what you have is a group of amateurs, led by another amateur and being trained by yet another amateur. Success in any science is rarely achieved by an amateur, hence it is not surprising that the results produced by their group have not been astounding.”
References
- UFO Rabbit Hole: Interview with Dean Radin on Psi Phenomena
- Jessica Utts: An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning
- Ray Hyman: Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena
- AIR: An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications
- CIA Reading Room: Psi Operational Capability
- Dean Radin: Peer-reviewed journal articles and books on psi phenomenon
- Stephan Schwartz: Through Time and Space: The Evidence for Remote Viewing
- Psi Encyclopedia: Remote Viewing
Episode 50, posted on