An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications

Studies of paranormal phenomena have nearly always been associated with controversy. Despite the controversy concerning their nature and existence, many individuals and organizations continue to be avidly interested in these phenomena. The intelligence community is no exception: beginning in the 1970s, it has conducted a program intended to investigate the application of one paranormal phenomenon—remote viewing, or the ability to describe locations one has not visited. Conceptually, remote viewing would seem to have tremendous potential utility for the intelligence community. Accordingly, a three-component program involving basic research, operations, and foreign assessment has been in place for some time. Prior to transferring this program to a new sponsoring organization within the intelligence community, a thorough program review was initiated. The part of the program review conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), a nonprofit, private research organization, consisted of two main components. The first component was a review of the research program. The second component was a review of the operational application of the remote viewing phenomenon in intelligence gathering. Evaluation of the foreign assessment component of the program was not within the scope of the present effort.

Research Evaluation

To evaluate the research program, a "blue ribbon" panel was assembled. The panel included two noted experts in the area of parapsychology: Dr. Jessica Utts, a Professor of Statistics at the University of California/Davis, and Dr. Raymond Hyman, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon. In addition to their extensive credentials, they were selected to represent both sides of the paranormal controversy: Dr. Utts has published articles that view paranormal interpretations positively, while Dr. Hyman was selected to represent a more skeptical position. Both, however, are viewed as fair and open-minded scientists. In addition to these experts, this panel included two Senior Scientists from AIR; both have recognized methodological expertise, and both had no prior background in parapsychological research. They were included in the review panel to provide an unbiased methodological perspective. In addition, Dr. Lincoln Moses, an Emeritus Professor at Stanford University, provided statistical advice, while Dr. David A. Goslin, President of AIR, served as coordinator of the research effort. Panel members were asked to review all laboratory experiments and meta-analytic reviews conducted as part of the research program; this consisted of approximately 80 separate publications, many of which are summary reports of multiple experiments. In the course of this review, special attention was given to those studies that (a) provided the strongest evidence for the remote viewing phenomenon, and (b) represented new experiments controlling for methodological artifacts identified in earlier reviews. Separate written reviews were prepared by Dr. Utts and Dr. Hyman. They exchanged reviews with other panel members who then tried to reach a consensus. In the typical remote viewing experiment in the laboratory, a remote viewer is asked to visualize a place, location, or object being viewed by a "beacon" or sender. A judge then examines the viewer's report and determines if this report matches the target or, alternatively, a set of decoys. In most recent laboratory experiments reviewed for the present evaluation, National Geographic photographs provided the target pool. If the viewer's reports match the target, as opposed to the decoys, a hit is said to have occurred. Alternatively, accuracy of a set of remote viewing reports is assessed by rank-ordering the similarity of each remote viewing report to each photograph in the target set (usually five photographs). A better-than-chance score is presumed to represent the occurrence of the paranormal phenomenon of remote viewing, since the remote viewers had not seen the photographs they had described (or did not know which photographs had been randomly selected for a particular remote viewing trial).