What is Remote Viewing? Declassifying a Psychic Phenomenon

Remote viewing is the psychic ability to acquire accurate information about a distant or non-local place, person, or event without using your physical senses or any other obvious means. It’s associated with the idea of clairvoyance, seemingly being able to spontaneously know something without actually knowing how you got the information. It is also sometimes called “anomalous cognition” or “second sight.”

Many of us experience this from time to time as an intuitive flash of insight that turns out to be correct. Many well-known entrepreneurs and business people, like George Soros, Conrad Hilton, Thomas Alva Edison, and Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, have attributed their business success to this ability. And we’ve all seen natural psychics perform seemingly amazing feats of mental skill on TV.

The difference between natural psychic receptivity and remote viewing is that the latter is a trained skill, a controlled process, that the average person can learn to do to some degree.

This ability seems to be distributed in the human population in varying degrees, just like a musical skill—some people are really good at playing an instrument, but almost everyone can hum a tune or whistle.

History of the Remote Viewing Program

Remote viewing in modern times originates from the U.S. government’s interest in psychic espionage during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Back during World War II, the Soviets had heard rumors that the U.S. military was using psychic spies and communications at sea. While it’s not clear now whether this was true, the Soviets believed it and started their own psychic training within their military and intelligence agencies many decades ago. The U.S. government learned of this program and, in the early 1970s, decided to create a remote viewing CIA training program.

Stanford Research Institute Remote Viewing Experiments

Money and resources were given by the Central Intelligence Agency to Stanford Research Institute (SRI), located on the campus of Stanford University at the time, to test the possibility of remote viewing. The goal was to disprove that psychic functioning was real. No one wanted it to exist. It was the last thing the military establishment wanted to worry about, especially if it was a new Soviet threat.

Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, working at SRI, were tasked with determining whether extrasensory perception (ESP) and related phenomena were real or not (known as parapsychology). During their parapsychological research, Targ and Putoff set about to locate some natural psychics and test them. Their first subject was artist, psychic, and scientist Ingo Swann of New York City, who had demonstrated an ability to accurately “remote view” weather in various American cities. He also published some articles about ESP and psychokinesis (the ability to mentally affect distant objects) when he worked with researcher Gertrude Schmeidler of City College and the American Society for Psychical Research.

Working with Schmeidler, Swann had shown that he could affect the temperature of thermistors sealed in insulated thermos canisters twenty-five feet away from him. At a friend’s request, Swann sent his published findings to Putoff, who asked Swann to come to SRI and demonstrate his abilities. The first thing they had Swann do was to see if he could affect a super sensitive, electromagnetically shielded quark detector buried five feet underground in a cement floor. Every time Putoff asked Swann to think about the detector (used to detect subatomic particles), the readings from the device would noticeably deviate from the baseline readings. Putoff was convinced that Swann had special abilities, and so the program to test and develop remote viewing began.

Expanded Scope

At first, they had Swann view objects in a box; this was a practice he was good at but quickly became bored with. Swann said to them, “I can view anything in the universe; this is a trivialization of my abilities.” A few days later, he came up with a new way to do remote viewing: viewing map coordinates. Targ and Putoff went out and bought the biggest atlas they could find at the local bookstore. Swann’s coordinate map viewing turned out to be a big success. A critic at the Central Intelligence Agency suggested that maybe he had memorized the entire global map.

Swann went on to use randomly chosen numerical coordinates to view randomly selected events, people, and structures around the planet. He performed equally well using this coordinate-based viewing system.

Validation of Remote Viewers

Swann coined the term “remote viewing” to describe the process, though you can question whether the information is remote to the viewer or whether the process is entirely visual. Some people are more sensitive to auditory, kinesthetic, or other sensory types, and few viewers actually “see” the target very clearly. Nonetheless, the name stuck and was sufficient to convince the intelligence agencies to fund the project.

Other viewers were also tasked to help Targ and Putoff understand remote viewing. Pat Price, a former police commissioner from Burbank, California, also proved to be an excellent viewer. Price used his own system to view where he imagined that he was at the distant target site. His results were so good that the Central Intelligence Agency hired him to work for them directly. Back East, another natural viewer, Joe McMoneagle, also known as “Remote Viewer No. 1,” worked directly with the U.S. Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was also tested and found to have amazing abilities to describe and sketch distant locations. Upon retirement, McMoneagle was awarded a Legion of Merit award, in part, for his five years of remote viewing missions for the military and various government agencies.

Beyond government use, some remote viewers have claimed applications in areas such as crime-solving, missing persons searches, and even financial market predictions. However, these claims remain anecdotal and lack independent verification.

Coordinate Remote Viewing

However, Swann was able to describe, with great precision, what he was doing with his mind and attention as he was viewing, an ability other viewers did not have. This allowed him to come up with a 6-stage system that could be taught to anyone, including you or me. It became known as CRV: Coordinate (or Controlled) Remote Viewing.

Swann’s CRV system is based on separating out signal from noise in your mind as you are viewing. All the information is recorded during a session, but the viewer puts the noise in a different place on the paper than the signal. At the end of the session, you can separate them from one another. The method became the basis of the remote viewing protocols that the U.S. Army taught to several groups of viewers. The program continued until 1995, at which point it was declassified by the government. Over two decades, approximately $20 million of funding went to what eventually became known as the Stargate Project.

Princeton’s Random Number Generator Research

During this time, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) at Princeton University, run by Bob Jahn and Brenda Dunn, also conducted twenty years of research into remote viewing and so-called “micro-psychokinesis” with experiments on the effect of human intention on Random Number Generators (RNGs). They found that looking at the cumulative results of hundreds of thousands of trials, their subjects could influence about 2 or 3 events per 10,000 random coin flips by seemingly moving the device away from true randomness in an inexplicable way. The odds of these results being by chance were an astonishing 375 trillion to one.

Scientific Analysis of the Program

When the Stargate program was declassified, one of the two people asked to evaluate the program was statistician Jessica Utts, the head of the American Statistical Association at the time of this writing. She concluded, “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research at SRI and SAIC (another government-sponsored think tank) have been replicated at several laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.”

Researcher Dean Radin, doing very complex meta-analyses using the results of many studies about psychic perception over many decades, came to the same conclusion. Looking at the entire population, not just trained viewers, remote viewing has a weak effect, about four to eight percent higher than expected if we were only using our physical senses to gather information; yet, it’s consistently there in everyone.

Coordinate Remote Viewing

However, Swann was able to describe, with great precision, what he was doing with his mind and attention as he was viewing, an ability other viewers did not have. This allowed him to come up with a 6-stage system that could be taught to anyone, including you or me. It became known as CRV: Coordinate (or Controlled) Remote Viewing.

Swann’s CRV system is based on separating out signal from noise in your mind as you are viewing. All the information is recorded during a session, but the viewer puts the noise in a different place on the paper than the signal. At the end of the session, you can separate them from one another. The method became the basis of the remote viewing protocols that the U.S. army taught to several groups of viewers. The program lasted until 1995 when it was declassified; about $20 million was spent over the two decades.

How Does Remote Viewing Work?

When someone asks you to describe something, you normally proceed to name what you’re perceiving using nouns and symbols. Remote viewing is just the opposite. You begin by describing your perceptions without trying to identify anything about what they mean or what the larger picture is. Start with basic gestalt: fundamental, general components of the target site, such as whether it’s manmade, living, or natural. You then proceed to basic colors, smells, temperatures, shapes, and sizes.

Unlike clear mental pictures, the information usually surfaces as vague impressions, symbols, or sensory cues. Remote viewers often describe textures, colors, or feelings rather than full images, which makes the verification and feedback loop essential to interpret the data accurately.

Only after you’ve been describing the target for a while can you proceed to more specific ideas and possibly names, nouns, and more analytical types of information.

In this way, Swann would say that you are opening the aperture of your perception slowly and resisting the temptation to draw conclusions about what you are viewing.

Follow the Ambiguity Methodology

Our minds are always attempting to conclude what we’ve perceived at any given moment, but because you have no conscious, physical information to work from in remote viewing, you’re almost always likely to be wrong if you do so. This brings us to one of the great paradoxes of remote viewing: the fainter the perception, the more likely it is to be accurate and the less likely you are to feel confident in that perception.

In other words, the more confident you are about your remote perceptions during the session, the less likely those perceptions are to be correct! And the less confident you feel, the more likely it is that your perceptions are right on. How’s that for a paradox?

Good remote viewers learn to trust the feelings of uncertainty and ambiguity they get while doing a session.

How to Learn Remote Viewing

If you’d like to explore remote viewing, there are many resources available. Books by participants in the original program—such as Joe McMoneagle, Lyn Buchanan, Paul Smith, Ingo Swann, Dale Graff, and researchers like Russell Targ or Ed May—offer firsthand accounts and training methods. Others, including Dean Radin, Courtney Brown, and Angela Thompson Smith, continued studying the subject after the government program was declassified. You can also look into the International Remote Viewers Association (IRVA), which holds an annual conference for those interested in the practice.

No one entirely understands how remote viewing works, so you’re likely to learn the most by keeping an open but balanced mindset as you read about it and perhaps try it for yourself. Meditation or other focus practices can be useful starting points, especially if you’ve never done any subtle awareness training before.

While many groups promote remote viewing as a learnable skill, it’s important to approach the practice with both curiosity and skepticism. Scientific consensus maintains that no controlled studies have confirmed its reliability, so any personal experiences should be treated as subjective rather than objective proof.