OK so first what is this whole remote viewing thing anyway?
In a nutshell Remote viewing is the ability of a person to accurately describe a distant target or location using only a random set of numbers as a cue.
Sound a bit far fetched? Oh that's only part of it.
I'll get into the hows and why later. First a bit of history.
Now I'm covering an abbreviated version of the history, it's a lot more complicated than this.
In the early 1970's the world was a lot more open minded than it is now.
People were openly experimenting with everything including psychic phenomena.
J.B Rhine had a very public experimental lab at Duke University in North Carolina. While the University allowed the lab to exist with some reluctance it was only closed in 1965 because Rhine retired.
In the early 70's in New York city the American Society for Physical Research was conducting it's own psychic experiments with a variety of people. One of the Subjects was Ingo Swann. Ingo was a local artist who was interested in psychic phenomena. The experiments were fairly boring so after a while Swann suggested trying to “see” what the weather was like in a distant city.
Remember this is before the internet. If you wanted to find out the weather you had to call someone on the phone or wait until the evening news came on. The experiments were surprisingly successful.
At the Same time Dr. Hal Putoff, a physicist at the Stanford research Institute and Russel Targ, a laser physicist were doing experiments with psychics on their own. They heard about Ingo Sawnn and started to do experiments with him at their research lab in California.
In a strange twist of fate the book “Psychic Discoveries behind the Iron Curtain” by Shilea Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder was making it's rounds through the American intelligence community.
The Cold war in those days was a very serious business and anything the Russians did was of interest, no matter how weird it seemed.
I'm sure the intelligence guys had a good laugh at the book until one of them one day wondered
“What if this is true? How do we defend against it?” That set off a mad scramble to find someone that could do the some credible research which led them to Putoff and Targ, who were already done research for the government in the area of lasers. They contacted Puttoff and Targ to do research ti see if Psychic experiments to see if there was anything to this psychic stuff.
The early experiments were fairly simple and variations on the distance experiments Swann had done with American Society for Physical research. Swann was not the only test subject there was also a photographer, Shelia Hammond and Burbank Police officer Pat Price who were also tested.
Some of the first test were a series of “outbounder” targets. Locations were chosen at random around the San Francisco bay area then sealed in a envelope. The Out bounder person was given the envelope and told to drive for X amount of time and then open the envelope and proceed to the target location.
That way neither the people doing the experiment not the target knew what the location was going to be. The experiments went surprisingly well.
Someone suggested doing more distant targets using geographic coordinates. Those also went very well. This became known as “Coordinate remote Viewing” Critics claimed that maybe the experimenters were remembering the coordinates of the entire earth. Far fetched but to be on the safe side random numbers were used for the target. Turns out the subjects were still able to describe distant locations with no problem.
In the beginning the CIA was providing most of the money for the research. In the late seventies they quit their funding but still kept tabs on the program. In 1975 the Air Force office of Foreign technology division started funding the research. In 1977 the U.S Army started their own in house Remote viewing unit. They were given training by Ingo Swann . Swann was asked to come up with a training program to see if the ability to remote view could be taught. The Army unit was funded by various government agencies and kept going by year to year approval.
The Army program went through different project names like “Grill flame, “Center lane”, and
“star gate”. All the while being given tasking by the CIA, the U.S. Army and various other government agencies. Jobs included everything from finding drugs, hostage situations, downed aircraft and the outcome of military missions.
The program was finally shut down in 1995 by the CIA. After a study they commissioned found that
"There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community.” according to David Goslin, of the American Institute for Research.
A course this was after 20 years of the program being in existence.
Hey it's a government agency maybe things move a bit slow there.
http://www.irva.org/remote-viewing/history.html
