Follow-up on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Remote Viewing Experiments
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Plain English Summary
Remember those CIA psychic spy programs from the Cold War? A team of mostly skeptical researchers decided to rerun those 'remote viewing' experiments with modern rigor — triple-blind protocols, over 20,000 trials, and 634 participants. They split people into believers and nonbelievers and gave them different target types. The believers viewing images scored impressively above chance, with an effect size (a measure of how big the result is) nearly double what the original CIA-funded studies found. The Bayes factor — a statistical way of weighing evidence — strongly favored a real effect. Here's where it gets really interesting: overall emotional intelligence (both experiential and strategic areas) predicted about 20% of who'd succeed in Group 2. People with low experiential emotional intelligence actually scored below chance. The authors carefully note that while the statistics are solid, they stop short of declaring remote viewing 'empirically verified' — a surprisingly cautious conclusion given their own strong results.
Abstract
Objectives: Since 1972, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) commissioned several research programs on remote viewing (RV) that were progressively declassified from 1995 to 2003. The main objectives of this research were to statistically replicate the original findings and address the question: What are the underlying cognitive mechanisms involved in RV? The research focused on emotional intelligence (EI) theory and intuitive information processing as possible hypothetical mechanisms. Methods: We used a quasi-experimental design with new statistical control techniques based on structural equation modeling, analysis of invariance, and forced-choice experiments to accurately objectify results. We measured emotional intelligence with the Mayer—Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test. A total of 347 participants who were nonbelievers in psychic experiences completed an RV experiment using targets based on location coordinates. A total of 287 participants reported beliefs in psychic experiences and completed another RV experiment using targets based on images of places. Moreover, we divided the total sample into further subsamples for the purpose of replicating the findings and also used different thresholds on standard deviations to test for variation in effect sizes. The hit rates on the psi-RV task were contrasted with the estimated chance. Results: The results of our first group analysis were nonsignificant, but the analysis applied to the second group produced significant RV-related effects corresponding to the positive influence of EI (i.e., hits in the RV experiments were 19.5% predicted from EI) with small to moderate effect sizes (between 0.457 and 0.853). Conclusions: These findings have profound implications for a new hypothesis of anomalous cognitions relative to RV protocols. Emotions perceived during RV sessions may play an important role in the production of anomalous cognitions. We propose the Production-Identification-Comprehension (PIC) emotional model as a function of behavior that could enhance VR test success.
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Cites
- The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena: A Review — Cardeña, Etzel (2018)
- Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence: The Case of Non-Local Perception, A Classical and Bayesian Review of Evidences — Tressoldi, Patrizio E (2011)
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- Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect — Bem, Daryl J (2011)
- Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's 'Retroactive Facilitation of Recall' Effect — Ritchie, Stuart J (2012)
- The Capricious, Actively Evasive, Unsustainable Nature of Psi: A Summary and Hypotheses — Kennedy, J.E (2003)
- Predictive Physiological Anticipation Preceding Seemingly Unpredictable Stimuli: A Meta-Analysis — Mossbridge, Julia (2012)
- An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications — Mumford, Michael D (1995)
Companion
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📋 Cite this paper
Escolà-Gascón, Álex, Houran, James, Dagnall, Neil, Drinkwater, Kenneth, Denovan, Andrew (2023). Follow-up on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Remote Viewing Experiments. Brain and Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.3026
@article{escola_gascon_2023_cia_remote_viewing,
title = {Follow-up on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Remote Viewing Experiments},
author = {Escolà-Gascón, Álex and Houran, James and Dagnall, Neil and Drinkwater, Kenneth and Denovan, Andrew},
year = {2023},
journal = {Brain and Behavior},
doi = {10.1002/brb3.3026},
}