Post by bluefedish on Jan 30, 2008 1:14:12 GMT -5
Remote Viewing (RV) is the purported ability for a person to gather information on a remote target that is hidden from the physical perception of the viewer and typically separated from the viewer at some distance, a form of extra-sensory perception. The term was introduced by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974.
As with other forms of extra-sensory perception, the objective validity of remote viewing has not been proved, and critics such as Randi and Clarke in An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural explain RV by normal means.
History
From World War II until the 1970s the US government occasionally funded ESP research. When the US intelligence community learned that the USSR and China were conducting ESP research it became receptive to the idea of having its own competing psi research program. (Schnabel 1997)
Early SRI Experiments
The report of a low-key psi experiment conducted in 1972 by SRI laser physicist, Hal Puthoff, with purported psychic Ingo Swann led to a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology.
The initial CIA-funded project was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials including John McMahon, then the head of the Office of Technical Service and later the Agency's deputy director, became strong supporters of the program. By the mid 1970s, facing the post-Watergate revelations of its "skeletons," and after internal criticism of the program, the CIA dropped sponsorship of the SRI research effort. Sponsorship was picked up by the Air Force, led by analyst Dale E. Graff of the Foreign Technology Division. In 1979, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which had been providing some taskings to the SRI investigators, was ordered to develop its own program by the Army's chief intelligence officer, Gen. Ed Thompson. CIA operations officers, working from McMahon's office and other offices, also continued to provide taskings to SRI's subjects. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005, Athingyer 2001)
The program had 3 parts. First was the evaluation of psi research performed by the U.S.S.R. and China, which appears to have been better-funded and better-supported than the government research in the U.S. (Schnabel 1997)
In the second part of the program, SRI managed its own stable of "natural" psychics both for research purposes and to make them available for tasking by a variety of US intelligence agencies. The most famous results from these years were the description of a big crane at a Soviet nuclear research facility (Kress 1977/199, Targ 1996), the description of a new class of Soviet strategic submarine (Smith 2005, McMoneagle 2002) and the location of a downed Soviet bomber in Africa (which former President Carter later referred to in speeches). By the early 1980s numerous offices throughout the intelligence community were providing taskings to SRI's psychics. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005)
The third branch of the program was a research project intended to find out if ESP -- now called "remote viewing" -- could be made accurate and reliable. The intelligence community offices that tasked the group seemed to believe that the phenomenon was real. But in the view of these taskers, a remote viewer could be "on" one day and "off" the next, a fact that made it hard for the technique to be officially accepted. Through SRI, individuals were studied for years in a search for physical (e.g., brain-wave) correlates that might reveal when they were "on- or off-target".
At SRI, Ingo Swann and Hal Puthoff also developed a remote-viewing training program meant to enable any individual with a suitable background to produce useful data. As part of this project, a number of military officers and civilians were trained and formed a military remote viewing unit, based at Fort Meade, Maryland. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005, McMoneagle 2002)
Decline and Termination
A struggle between unbelievers and "true believers" in the sponsor organisations provided much of the program's actual drama. Each side seems to have been utterly convinced that the other's views were wrong. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005)
In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soyster, appointed an Army Colonel, William Johnson, to manage the remote viewing unit and evaluate its objective usefulness. According to an account by former SRI-trained remote-viewer, Paul Smith (2005), Johnson spent several months running the remote viewing unit against military and DEA targets, and ended up a believer, not only in remote viewing's validity as a phenomenon but in its usefulness as an intelligence tool.
After the Democrats lost control of the Senate in late 1994, funding declined and the program went into decline. The project was transferred out of DIA to the CIA in 1995, with the promise that it would be evaluated there, but most participants in the program believed that it would be terminated.
Criticism
According to Dr. David Marks in experiments conducted in the 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute, the notes given to the judges contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets, or they had the date of the session written at the top of the page. Dr. Marks concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates.
Dr. Marks has also suggested that the participants of remote viewing experiments are influenced by subjective validation, a process through which correspondences are perceived between stimuli that are in fact associated purely randomly. Details and transcripts of the SRI remote viewing experiments themselves were found to be edited and even unattainable.
Others have said that, the information from remote viewing sessions can be vague and include a lot of erroneous data. The 1995 report for the American Institute for Research "An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications" by Mumford, Rose and Goslin, contains a section of anonymous reports describing how remote viewing was tentatively used in a number of operational situations. The three reports conclude that the data was too vague to be of any use, and in the report that offers the most positive results the writer notes that the viewers "had some knowledge of the target organizations and their operations but not the background of the particular tasking at hand."
According to James Randi, controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts.
Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) has said that he agrees remote viewing has been proven using the normal standards of science, but that the bar of evidence needs to be much higher for paranormal claims and thus he remains unconvinced.
Selected Source:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing
As with other forms of extra-sensory perception, the objective validity of remote viewing has not been proved, and critics such as Randi and Clarke in An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural explain RV by normal means.
History
From World War II until the 1970s the US government occasionally funded ESP research. When the US intelligence community learned that the USSR and China were conducting ESP research it became receptive to the idea of having its own competing psi research program. (Schnabel 1997)
Early SRI Experiments
The report of a low-key psi experiment conducted in 1972 by SRI laser physicist, Hal Puthoff, with purported psychic Ingo Swann led to a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology.
The initial CIA-funded project was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials including John McMahon, then the head of the Office of Technical Service and later the Agency's deputy director, became strong supporters of the program. By the mid 1970s, facing the post-Watergate revelations of its "skeletons," and after internal criticism of the program, the CIA dropped sponsorship of the SRI research effort. Sponsorship was picked up by the Air Force, led by analyst Dale E. Graff of the Foreign Technology Division. In 1979, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which had been providing some taskings to the SRI investigators, was ordered to develop its own program by the Army's chief intelligence officer, Gen. Ed Thompson. CIA operations officers, working from McMahon's office and other offices, also continued to provide taskings to SRI's subjects. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005, Athingyer 2001)
The program had 3 parts. First was the evaluation of psi research performed by the U.S.S.R. and China, which appears to have been better-funded and better-supported than the government research in the U.S. (Schnabel 1997)
In the second part of the program, SRI managed its own stable of "natural" psychics both for research purposes and to make them available for tasking by a variety of US intelligence agencies. The most famous results from these years were the description of a big crane at a Soviet nuclear research facility (Kress 1977/199, Targ 1996), the description of a new class of Soviet strategic submarine (Smith 2005, McMoneagle 2002) and the location of a downed Soviet bomber in Africa (which former President Carter later referred to in speeches). By the early 1980s numerous offices throughout the intelligence community were providing taskings to SRI's psychics. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005)
The third branch of the program was a research project intended to find out if ESP -- now called "remote viewing" -- could be made accurate and reliable. The intelligence community offices that tasked the group seemed to believe that the phenomenon was real. But in the view of these taskers, a remote viewer could be "on" one day and "off" the next, a fact that made it hard for the technique to be officially accepted. Through SRI, individuals were studied for years in a search for physical (e.g., brain-wave) correlates that might reveal when they were "on- or off-target".
At SRI, Ingo Swann and Hal Puthoff also developed a remote-viewing training program meant to enable any individual with a suitable background to produce useful data. As part of this project, a number of military officers and civilians were trained and formed a military remote viewing unit, based at Fort Meade, Maryland. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005, McMoneagle 2002)
Decline and Termination
A struggle between unbelievers and "true believers" in the sponsor organisations provided much of the program's actual drama. Each side seems to have been utterly convinced that the other's views were wrong. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005)
In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soyster, appointed an Army Colonel, William Johnson, to manage the remote viewing unit and evaluate its objective usefulness. According to an account by former SRI-trained remote-viewer, Paul Smith (2005), Johnson spent several months running the remote viewing unit against military and DEA targets, and ended up a believer, not only in remote viewing's validity as a phenomenon but in its usefulness as an intelligence tool.
After the Democrats lost control of the Senate in late 1994, funding declined and the program went into decline. The project was transferred out of DIA to the CIA in 1995, with the promise that it would be evaluated there, but most participants in the program believed that it would be terminated.
Criticism
According to Dr. David Marks in experiments conducted in the 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute, the notes given to the judges contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets, or they had the date of the session written at the top of the page. Dr. Marks concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates.
Dr. Marks has also suggested that the participants of remote viewing experiments are influenced by subjective validation, a process through which correspondences are perceived between stimuli that are in fact associated purely randomly. Details and transcripts of the SRI remote viewing experiments themselves were found to be edited and even unattainable.
Others have said that, the information from remote viewing sessions can be vague and include a lot of erroneous data. The 1995 report for the American Institute for Research "An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications" by Mumford, Rose and Goslin, contains a section of anonymous reports describing how remote viewing was tentatively used in a number of operational situations. The three reports conclude that the data was too vague to be of any use, and in the report that offers the most positive results the writer notes that the viewers "had some knowledge of the target organizations and their operations but not the background of the particular tasking at hand."
According to James Randi, controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts.
Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) has said that he agrees remote viewing has been proven using the normal standards of science, but that the bar of evidence needs to be much higher for paranormal claims and thus he remains unconvinced.
Selected Source:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing
