Evidence of remote viewing

Discussion in 'Parapsychology' started by Magical Realist, May 16, 2014.

  1. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Last edited: May 17, 2014
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  3. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Any statistically valid evidence in controlled conditions?
     
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  5. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Yes. The doctors in charge of the studies concluded the following:

    In 1995, the CIA declassified and approved the release of documents revealing its involvement in a remote viewing program conducted at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA (2). The program was designed to determine if agencies like the CIA could use such phenomena for “intelligence collection (2).” The research conducted by Stanford University and the CIA lasted for decades and confirmed the fact that the intelligence community has a high interest and involvement in parapsychological phenomena. The study was comprised of department of defense personnel and an individual named Ingo Swann(2) -just to name one of the many. Research was conducted by Russel Targ and Harold E. Puthoff, the Doctors who founded the 23 year long study at Stanford University alongside Defense Intelligence Agencies and Army Intelligence(2).


    "Successful replication of this type of remote viewing in independent laboratories has yielded considerable scientific evidence for the reality of the (remote viewing) phenomenon. Adding to the strength of these results was the discovery that a growing number of individuals could be found to demonstrate high-quality remote viewing, often to their own surprise. The CIA even participated as remote viewers themselves in order to critique the protocols. CIA personnel generated successful target descriptions of sufficiently high quality to permit blind matching of descriptions to targets by independent judges(2)."---http://www.collective-evolution.com...tudies-confirm-the-reality-of-remote-viewing/
     
    Last edited: May 16, 2014
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  7. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Mmmh.......
    So the people employed and engaged in running research said that it was valuable and worth continuing.
    Nancy Reagan's astrologers would have said the same thing.
    Anything else?
     
  8. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Who else but the scientists running the programs would know better about the results than anyone else?
     
  9. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Great, another government scam.
     
  10. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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  11. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    For ascertaining the presence of WMD perhaps.
    How did that work out?
     
  12. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    And who else but the scientists would benefit from a conclusion that keeps the money spigot open?

    Most people will find ways to believe anything - anything at all - that lets them keep a good job.
     
  13. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    That's a two-edged sword. Most people will also find ways to doubt anything--anything at all--that lets them keep a good job. There are for example many people out there whose entire reputation and career success depends on all evidence for the paranormal being invalid. Whole societies, magazines, and websites banking on the assumed nonexistence of anything paranormal. No doubt these professional skeptics lose sleep at night with every new study claiming evidence for the paranormal. I know I would.
     
  14. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    Remote viewing has the same chance of being successful as guessing does. For crying out loud how old am I? Hey that's none of my buisness!!
     
  15. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    "The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in a decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence." – Nikola Tesla
     
  16. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    "In 1987 Mobius began fieldwork in an area of the Grand Bahama Banks encompassing some 579.15 square miles (1500 sq. km). Their report compares the Remote Viewing, electronic remote sensing, and visual search process used to locate the wreck site of a previously undiscovered armed American merchantman believed to be the Brig Leander. Remote Viewing was the source of information which led to the site�s location. The probability of finding this sunken brig, by chance, is conservatively estimated to be p = 0.00009. This is equivalent to odds of 10,000 to 1 that this brig was found by chance alone.

    In addition to location information, there was a great deal of descriptive data concerning what would be found. For example, �I feel wood, big pieces of wood, like railroad ties��. (See Figures at right.) This may sound generic. It is not. The massive timbers of the Leander are a rare case of a ship that sank intact. There is no other ship recovery on record in the License Area that matches this site. There does not seem to have been another equivalent reported excavation like this on the entire Banks.

    Another description from the transcripts predicts �and small glass bottles.� Small glass bottles rarely survive the constant movement of sand, and currents on the Bank. The probability of discovering one is very small. Yet two were found in the wreckage of this site. There were a total of 193 conceptual descriptive concepts concerning the site were proffered by the twelve Remote Viewers. Of this, 148 concepts, or 75% of the total, could be evaluated through direct field observations, or historical research. An evaluation of this material reveals 84% Correct, 12% Partially Correct, 4% Incorrect. There is little accuracy variation across the sequence of material from the Los Angeles interviews ( 84% Corr., 13% Part. Corr., 3% Incorr.), to the on-site data (81% Corr., 11% Part. Corr., 8% Incorr.).".
     
  17. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    Caca de toro.
     
  18. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Princeton's PEAR Project

    "In another class of studies, the ability of human participants to acquire information about spatially and temporally remote geographical targets, otherwise inaccessible by any of the usual sensory channels, has been thoroughly demonstrated over several hundred carefully conducted experiments. The protocol required one participant, the "agent," to be stationed at a randomly selected location at a given time, and there to observe and record impressions of the details and ambiance of the scene. A second participant, the "percipient," located far from the scene and with no prior information about it, tried to sense its composition and character and to report these in a similar format to the agent’s description.

    Even casual comparison of the agent and percipient narratives produced in this body of experiments reveals striking correspondences in both their general and specific aspects, indicative of some anomalous channel of information acquisition, well beyond any chance expectation. Incisive analytical techniques have been developed and applied to these data to establish more precisely the quantity and quality of objective and subjective information acquired and to guide the design of more effective experiments. Beyond confirming the validity of this anomalous mode of information acquisition, these analyses demonstrate that this capacity of human consciousness is also largely independent of the distance between the percipient and the target, and similarly independent of the time between the specification of the target and the perception effort.

    Over its long history, PEAR has accumulated over 650 remote perception trials, performed over several phases of investigation. Numerous scoring methods have involved various arrays of descriptor queries that have been addressed to both the physical targets and the percipients' subjective descriptions thereof, the responses to which have provided the basis for numerical evaluation and statistical assessment of the degree of anomalous information acquired under a variety of experimental protocols. Twenty-four such recipes were employed, with queries posed in binary, ternary, quaternary, and ten-level distributive formats. Thus treated, the composite database yields a probability against chance of approximately three parts in ten billion.

    The overall results are not noticeably affected by any of the secondary protocol parameters tested, or by variations in descriptor effectiveness, possible participant response biases, target distances from the percipients, or time intervals between perception efforts and target visitations by the agents. However, over the evolution of the analysis programs there has been a striking diminution of the anomalous yield that appears to be associated with the participants' growing attention to, and dependence upon, the progressively more detailed descriptor formats. An intrinsic complementarity is thereby suggested between the analytical and intuitive aspects of the remote perception process that appears to limit the extent to which such anomalous effects can be simultaneously produced and evaluated (see "Information and Uncertainty in Remote Perception Research")."---http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/experiments.html
     
  19. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    "What We Know About Remote Viewing"

    From Miracles of Mind
    by Russell Targ and Jane Katra


    "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.
     
  20. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    I met Russ Targ once. In 1975. He was a physicist/former-physicist then researching 'paranormal' at the SRI. He asked me a 'profound' physics question, which I paraphrase: "If you push one end of a pencil, why does the other end move?" I thought it was obvious. Perhaps I was wrong.
     
  21. Boris2 Valued Senior Member

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  22. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    From article:

    "The kind of tasks that kept us in business for twenty-three years include: SRI psychics found a downed Russian bomber in Africa; reported on the health of American hostages in Iran; described Soviet weapons factories in Siberia; located a kidnapped US general in Italy; and accurately forecasted the failure of a Chinese atomic-bomb test three days before it occurred, etc. When San Francisco heiress Patricia Hearst was abducted from her home in Berkeley, a psychic with the SRI team was the first to identify the kidnapper by name and then accurately describe and locate the kidnap car. I was at the Berkeley police station and witnessed this event."

    Psuedoscience indeed! lol!
     
  23. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    This is anecdotal.
    Any science?
     

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