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Remote viewing

A claimed cognitive ability to perceive distant or hidden targets in the absence of any sensory channel between viewer and target — the principal technique funded by US intelligence under the 1972–1995 STARGATE programme sequence

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Remote viewing is a claimed cognitive ability to perceive distant or hidden targets in the absence of any sensory channel between viewer and target. The term is associated principally with the 1972–1995 sequence of US intelligence-funded research and operational programmes at Stanford Research Institute and at the small operational unit at Fort Meade, Maryland; the principal documentary archive is the declassified CIA STARGATE Collection released in 1995–96. The technique is a specific sub-category of the broader parapsychology research field; the methodological-discipline framing parallel to AUTHINT — treating the cognitive substrate itself as a collection mechanism — is given in the GATEINT lexicon entry.

The methodological structure of remote-viewing sessions, as developed at Stanford Research Institute through the 1970s and refined by Ingo Swann into the "Coordinate Remote Viewing" protocol that successive Army and DIA operational units used, asks a trained viewer to produce verbal and sketched impressions of a target specified only by geographic coordinates, by sealed envelope, or by some other minimally-cued identifier. The session is conducted blind: the viewer is given no information about the target's content beyond the cueing identifier, and the monitor running the session (where one is present) is also typically blind to the target. Subsequent target imagery or other ground-truth material is then compared against the session product to assess the degree of correspondence. The structured-protocol approach was a substantial departure from earlier parapsychology methodology, which had typically used forced-choice card-guessing paradigms.

The principal operational claims documented in the CIA STARGATE Collection — and treated in detail in the STARGATE dossier — concern Joseph McMoneagle's 1979 session describing a Soviet shipyard at Severodvinsk that included a large submarine class then under construction (preceding the public emergence of the Typhoon-class ballistic-missile submarine); sessions during the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis and the 1985–1986 Lebanon hostage cases; and sessions targeting Libya in advance of the 1986 US air strikes. The session reports themselves contain substantial material that is descriptively suggestive but operationally ambiguous — sketches and impressions with partial correspondence to subsequent target imagery alongside material with no apparent correspondence. The interpretive question — whether the correlations exceeded chance, and whether the operational product was actionable — became the subject of the 1995 American Institutes for Research review that recommended programme termination.

The post-1995 status of the technique is divided along the same methodological lines that the AIR review's Utts/Hyman split captured. The methodological proponents — including Edwin May (the SRI principal investigator after Harold Puthoff's departure), Russell Targ, the surviving operational viewers (McMoneagle, Mel Riley, Lyn Buchanan, David Morehouse, Ed Dames), and the parapsychology community organised around the Journal of Scientific Exploration — argue that the laboratory and operational statistics indicate something requires further investigation. The methodological critics — including Ray Hyman, the broader skeptical community, and most mainstream cognitive scientists — maintain that the apparent statistics are explained by a combination of subtle protocol leakage, data-selection effects, absence of independent replication, and the high baseline rate at which loosely-evaluated verbal descriptions can be made to fit subsequently-revealed targets. The site's editorial framing on the contested underlying question is to present the public record without taking a position.

Civilian remote-viewing practice continues as a small subculture — operational viewers from the STARGATE period including Buchanan, Morehouse, and Dames offer commercial training; Edwin May's Laboratories for Fundamental Research continues academic work; the technique has been adapted in modified form for various therapeutic and consultative applications. The institutional-intelligence use of the technique is, as a documented matter, a closed chapter that ended with the 1995 CIA termination.

See also