For a phenomenon thought in many circles not to exist, we
certainly know a great deal about how to increase and decrease
its accuracy and reliability.
Accuracy and Reliability of Remote Viewing:
Finding the target: Remote viewers can often contact,
experience and describe a hidden object, or a remote natural or
architectural site, based on the presence of a cooperative person
at the location, geographical coordinates, or some other target
demarcation, which we call an address. We have shown that it is
not necessary for someone to know the correct answer at the time
of the viewing. For example, in precognitive remote viewing, the
target may not even be chosen at the time of the experimental
trial, but of course, the viewer will get to see the feedback
later.
Target attributes most often sensed:
Shape, form and color are described much more reliably by
inexperienced viewers than the target's function, or other
analytical information. In addition to visual imagery, viewers
sometimes describe associated feelings, sounds, smells and even
electrical or magnetic fields. As a viewer, I have learned that
if I see a color clearly and brightly, or something silver and
shiny, that is the aspect of the target that I am most likely to
describe correctly.
It is even possible for viewers to experience aspects of a
target which are not actually manifested. For example, some
viewers can reliably describe the color of an object which is
inside an opaque box where there is no light to give it any color
at all.
Temporal sensing:
Viewers can sense present, past and future activities at
target sites. In 1982, nine remote viewing forecasts were made
four days in advance for changes in the price of silver futures
on the COMEX commodity exchange, and all nine were correct. There
is not a drop of evidence to indicate that it is more difficult
to look slightly into the future, than it is to describe an
object in a box in front of you. Actually, it's better not to
look at the box when you are doing remote viewing, because you
may be tempted to try to see the target by pretending that you
have x-ray vision, which, in our experience, does not work.
It is not proven, but I believe that it is easier to describe
a target that you will see in the near future, than one you will
see many days in the future. It may be a purely psychological
effect. If my feedback is delayed by a week or more, then I have
somewhat forgotten what my description felt like to me. As
a result, the feedback, which is supposed to be the source of
that earlier perception, will have less of an impact on me,
thereby decreasing the quality of the viewing. The idea that a
later event is the cause of an earlier perception is a confusing
though very important concept.
Accuracy and reliability:
Blueprint accuracy can sometimes be achieved, and reliability
in a series can be as high as 80%. Unlike card-guessing or other
forced-choice experiments, more than two decades of remote
viewing research have shown no decline in people's remote viewing
performance over time. With practice, people become increasingly
able to separate out the psychic signal from the mental noise of
memory and imagination.
Spatial accuracy:
Targets and target details as small as 1 mm can be sensed.
Hella Hammid successfully described microscopic picture targets
as small as one millimeter square in an experimental series at
SRI in 1979.[1] She also correctly identified a silver pin and a
spool of thread inside an aluminum film can.
In the 1890s, Annie Besant worked with psychic C. W.
Leadbeater in an imaginative study to describe the structure of
atoms. In this early research at the English Theosophical
Society, Leadbeater was the first person in the world to describe
the distinctive nuclear structure of the three isotopes of
hydrogen. In his book Occult Chemistry published in 1898,
he wrote that he clairvoyantly saw that a given atom of
hydrogen could have one, two, or three particles in its nucleus,
and still be hydrogen. Isotopes had not yet been discovered by
chemists. Leadbeater was the first to report that atoms of
different atomic weights could still retain their chemical
identity. [2]
Distance effects:
Again and again we have seen that accuracy and resolution of
remote viewing targets are not sensitive to variations in
distance of up to 10,000 miles. An example of such long-distance
viewing is described in Chapter 2 with Djuna Davitashvili in the
1984 Moscow - San Francisco remote viewing.
Electrical shielding:
Faraday-cage screen rooms and underwater shielding have no
negative effects on remote viewing. In fact, some viewers very
much like to work in an electrically-shielded environment. The
well-known psychic Eileen Garrett showed me such a room that she
had built for her own use, in her offices at the Parapsychology
Foundation, on 57th Street in New York City. Pat Price did his
fine description of the Rinconada Park Swimming Pool Complex and
several other sites from inside SRI's shielded room. In fact,
recent findings from Physicist James Spottiswoode** show that
electromagnetic radiation from our milky way galaxy and the
electromagnetic effects of solar flares both degrade psychic
functioning. Electrical shielding seems to help performance, and
so does carrying out experiments when the galactic radiation is
at a minimum at your location. When the milky way is below your
position of the earth, rather than above your head, you have a
two hour window of opportunity. This occurs at 1300 hours
sidereal time, but it is still possible to be abundantly psychic
any time of the day or night.
In 1978, Hella Hammid and Ingo Swann successfully received
messages sent from Palo Alto, while they were inside of a
submarine submerged in 500 feet of sea water, 500 miles away.[3]
Hella and Ingo each had five file cards to look at later, with a
target location description written on one side, and a submarine
type of instruction on the other, as a sort of code device. For
example, the five targets were a large oak tree, an indoor
shopping plaza, etc.; and the messages were the kind of thing you
might communicate to a submerged sub that was out of radio
contact because of the salt water, such as, "Remain
submerged, Return to port, Fire at priority targets," etc.
In each case my colleague and I would hide ourselves in Palo Alto
at a specified time, and the viewers in the sub would have to
describe the location where we were. They would then look at each
of the five cards to see which one best matched their remote
viewing experience, and the message to be sent was found on the
back of the card. Both trials in this experiment were successful.
(The statistical significance would be found by multiplying
together the two 1-in-5 events, to give a probability of p =
0.04, or less than four times in a hundred occurring by chance,
which many would consider a significant result.)
Factors that inhibit remote viewing:
A prior knowledge of target possibilities, absence of
feedback, and use of mental analysis all inhibit remote viewing.
Any visual or audio distractions, or anything novel in the
working environment will tend to show up in the viewer's pictures
in the remote viewing session. Numbers are much more difficult to
perceive than pictorial targets. For example, it is much more
difficult to guess the number from 1 to 10, than it is to
describe the location chosen from an infinitude of planetary
locations that you have never seen before. In looking for the
geographical target, you apparently search your interior mental
landscape for a surprise, and that will usually be the correct
answer. With a number target, there are no surprises, since you
are already familiar with all the possibilities, and you are apt
to try to use analysis to rule out the various choices.
Factors that enhance remote viewing:
Seriousness of purpose, feedback, heart-to-heart trust among
participants, and acceptance of psi all enhance remote viewing.
Experienced viewers learn to improve their performance by
becoming aware of their mental noise from memory and imagination,
and filtering it out; and by writing down their impressions, and
drawing their mental pictures. Drawing is especially important
because it gives you direct access to your unconscious processes.
Multiple viewers to improve performance:
The use of several remote viewers can sometimes bring
additional information or different points of view. However, it
is more likely that the viewers all describe the same wrong
target. If individual viewers each have their own target set,
this problem can very likely be overcome. The experiment we
describe in Chapter 5 successfully demonstrates this.
Technological considerations:
There are more than a hundred published reports suggesting
that people are able to psychically affect the normally equal
distribution of 1's and 0's from a random number generator. We
believe that it is unclear from the present data, whether viewers
can perturb the electronic equipment by their mental processes,
or whether they use their ESP abilities to choose an optimal
moment to start an experiment. Every long string of randomly
generated 1's and 0's will contain a subset of statistically
significant departures from balanced distribution. A psychic
person might easily use his ESP to start his experimental test by
buying into a naturally occurring deviant sequence, and not have
to create it psychokinetically.
Edwin May and James Spottiswoode have written extensively on
this subject, and throw into question the existence of any
psychokinetic (i.e. mind affecting matter) phenomena that is part
of a repetitive experimental series. Abraham Maslow, the famous
psychologist, would call this optimal starting, "good
choosing." May and Spottiswoode call it "decision
augmentation." [4]
Theoretical considerations:
It appears clear to us that viewers can focus their attention
on distant points in space-time and then describe and experience
that distant location. Feedback is essential for learning, but is
not necessary for psi functioning. It is as though the viewer is
examining his or her own small, low-resolution, local piece of
the four-dimensional space-time hologram in which he or she is
embedded. This concept is based on the work of physicist David
Bohm, and is discussed in his physics text book.
_________________________________________
1. Puthoff, H.E., Targ, R., & Tart, C.T. (1980).
"Resolution in remote viewing studies." in Research
in Parapsychology 1979. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.
2. Leadbeater, C. W. (1898). Occult Chemistry. London:
Theosophical Society.
3. Targ, Russell, May, E. C., and Puthoff, H. E. (1979). "Direct
perception of remote geographic locations." in Mind At
Large: Proc. of IEEE symposia on Extrasensory Perception. New
York: Praeger.
4. May, Edwin. C., Spottiswoode, James and Utts, Jessica
(September, 1995). Decision augmentation theory: Toward a model
of anomalous mental phenomena. J. Parapsychology, 59,
p.195-221.
|