Remote Viewing Techniques

What Is Remote Viewing?

Remote viewing is the structured practice of obtaining accurate impressions about a distant, concealed, or otherwise inaccessible target through what researchers term anomalous cognition — perception that cannot be explained by known sensory means. It is distinguished from casual psychic claims by its protocol-based methodology, double-blind design, and the substantial body of controlled experimental data generated by more than two decades of government-funded research.

Physicist Russell Targ, who co-directed the remote viewing research programme at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) for over a decade, defines it precisely: "Remote viewing is a mental faculty that allows a perceiver, or viewer, to describe or give details about a target that is inaccessible to normal senses due to distance, time, or shielding." The key words in this definition are "mental faculty" — the programme operated on the premise that this was a normal, trainable human capacity, not an exceptional paranormal gift.

The term "remote viewing" itself was coined by Targ and Puthoff to provide neutral, scientifically respectable language for what was previously called clairvoyance or ESP — terminology laden with historical and religious associations that interfered with dispassionate scientific investigation.

The Stanford Research Institute Programme

The formal scientific investigation of remote viewing began in 1972 when physicist Harold Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute received an unusual visitor: Ingo Swann, an artist and researcher with a track record of apparently anomalous performance in laboratory settings at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York. Swann proposed a specific experiment: he would attempt to influence the magnetic field of a well-shielded magnetometer buried several metres underground in a physics laboratory at Stanford.

Puthoff reported that Swann appeared to affect the magnetometer output in ways that were difficult to explain through conventional means. He contacted his colleague Russell Targ, and together they designed a more rigorous set of experiments. The results were sufficiently striking that Puthoff briefed the CIA, which subsequently provided initial funding to investigate whether the phenomenon could have intelligence applications.

The SRI programme ran from 1972 to 1985, producing experimental results published in peer-reviewed journals including Nature (1974) and the Proceedings of the IEEE (1976). The Nature paper, which described controlled experiments with Swann and another high-performing viewer named Pat Price, sparked significant controversy in the scientific community — but it was published after peer review and has not been retracted.

Ingo Swann: The Central Figure

Ingo Swann (1933-2013) was the most important individual in the development of remote viewing as a formal discipline. An artist by training, he had been a research subject at the American Society for Psychical Research before approaching Puthoff at SRI. His demonstrations in the early SRI experiments — particularly his ability to accurately describe suppressed target locations provided only as geographic coordinates — were the primary evidence that convinced the US government to fund a sustained research programme.

Swann's most famous early demonstration involved a target specified only as latitude 42.75 N, 83.45 W. Working with only these coordinates, Swann produced a verbal description of the target that included references to specific industrial features. The target turned out to be an industrial facility near Waterford, Michigan. This type of coordinate-driven performance became the basis for what Swann later developed into the Coordinate Remote Viewing protocol.

In his books — including Natural ESP (1987), Psychic Sexuality (1999), and his self-published online archives — Swann developed an elaborate theoretical framework for understanding remote viewing in terms of consciousness, information access, and the nature of perception itself. He argued that what he called "the biomind" has inherent capacities for accessing nonlocal information that are systematically suppressed by the cultural emphasis on rational-analytical thought.

Swann died in January 2013, having spent the last decades of his life writing, painting, and developing his theoretical understanding of psychic phenomena. His archives, available at ingoswann.com, remain one of the most extensive primary source collections in the field.

Project STARGATE

Project STARGATE was the final and most widely known code name for the US government's remote viewing intelligence programme, which operated under several earlier names: Project SCANATE (1972), Project GONDOLA WISH (1977), Project GRILL FLAME (1978-1983), and Project CENTER LANE (1983-1985) before the programme moved from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) under the names Project SUN STREAK and later Project STARGATE.

At its operational peak, STARGATE employed a team of trained military remote viewers at Fort Meade, Maryland. Key personnel included Joseph McMoneagle, considered the most accomplished operational viewer in the programme's history, who received the Legion of Merit for his intelligence contributions. Courtney Brown, Gary Langford, Mel Riley, and Lyn Buchanan were among the other trained viewers who contributed to operational missions.

In 1995, the CIA commissioned an independent review of the programme. Two reviewers were selected: Jessica Utts, a statistician at UC Davis who was expected to evaluate the evidence, and Ray Hyman, a psychologist and sceptic who was expected to provide counterbalancing critique. Their conclusions differed significantly.

Utts concluded: "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." Hyman agreed that the statistical results were anomalous but argued that non-paranormal explanations could not yet be ruled out. The CIA cited Hyman's more conservative position in its decision to terminate the programme.

Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV): The Protocol

The Coordinate Remote Viewing protocol was developed collaboratively between Ingo Swann and military intelligence officer Skip Atwater at Fort Meade in the early 1980s. It was further systematised by Army captain and RV trainer Paul Smith, who published the definitive public account in The Complete Remote Viewer's Handbook (2014).

CRV operates on a fundamental principle: the target contains information that can be accessed through a structured series of stages, each designed to elicit a different type and depth of data while preventing the viewer's analytical mind from contaminating raw perceptual input. The stages are:

Analytical Overlay and Mental Noise

The concept of analytical overlay (AOL) is perhaps the most practically important in all of remote viewing training. AOL is the tendency of the conscious, analytical mind to interpret incoming perceptions before they are fully received — to jump from a raw impression to a named, categorised conclusion.

For example: a viewer working a target might receive a genuine impression of curved metallic structures at height. Unmanaged, the analytical mind immediately constructs: "It's the Eiffel Tower." This named conclusion — which may or may not be correct — then dominates the session, causing the viewer to describe the Eiffel Tower rather than the actual target. If the target happens to be a different structure with curved metal, the AOL has produced a plausible-sounding but incorrect description.

In CRV training, viewers learn to recognise the specific mental texture of AOL — a kind of leaping or jumping sensation, a sudden conviction — and to note it explicitly (writing "AOL: Eiffel Tower" in the session transcript) rather than incorporating it as data. The notation sets it aside without suppressing or arguing with it, allowing the viewer to continue receiving raw perceptions.

The staged CRV structure is specifically designed to honour this principle: Stages 1 and 2 collect raw sensory data before any analysis is invited. Only in Stage 4 does the protocol explicitly invite conceptual and analytical engagement, by which point enough uncontaminated perceptual data has been collected to provide context for interpretation.

Scientific Evidence

The peer-reviewed evidence for remote viewing spans several decades and multiple research groups. The most comprehensive meta-analysis was published in the Psychological Bulletin in 1994 by Dean Radin and Daryl Bem, who examined 79 studies of forced-choice clairvoyance (related to remote viewing) conducted between 1974 and 1994. The combined effect size was statistically significant far beyond chance levels (p = 6 x 10^-17), a result that has been cited in subsequent literature as among the strongest in parapsychology research.

The original SRI programme produced papers in Nature (1974), the Proceedings of the IEEE (1976), and multiple other peer-reviewed venues. The Nature paper describing controlled experiments with Ingo Swann and Pat Price was accompanied by a critical commentary from sceptics but was not retracted, and the journal's editor acknowledged the experiments appeared to have been conducted with adequate controls.

More recent research at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, directed by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne at Princeton University for over 28 years, accumulated a large database of remote perception experiments. Their findings, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration and summarised in their book Margins of Reality (1987), consistently showed effects above chance that could not be attributed to statistical artefact.

Learning Remote Viewing

The government programme operated explicitly on the premise that remote viewing is a human capacity trainable in ordinary people rather than an exceptional gift present in a few. Ingo Swann's consistent position was that everyone has this capacity, but that the habitual dominance of analytical thought suppresses it in most people most of the time.

Several former government programme participants now teach CRV: Paul Smith through Remote Viewing Instructional Services (RVIS), Lyn Buchanan through Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) training, and Courtney Brown through the Farsight Institute's training programmes. These instructors bring direct practical experience from the government programme and teach the formal protocol rather than intuitive approaches.

Beginner Practice Techniques

Before attempting formal CRV training, beginners can develop foundational skills through simpler exercises that build the core capacities: quieting analytical overlay, attending to subtle impressions, and learning to distinguish genuine perceptions from wishful thinking.

Frequently Asked Questions