The inner life
Remote Viewing
Direct answer
Remote Viewing: Remote viewing is a procedure in which a person in a closed room describes or sketches a distant place they have not seen. It was devised in the early 1970s and funded by United States agencies until 1995.
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At a glance
- Also called
- remote viewer, psychic spying
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Clairvoyance, Stargate Project, Extrasensory Perception, Parapsychology
Remote viewing is a procedure in which a person in a closed room describes or sketches a distant place they have not seen. It was devised in the early 1970s and funded by United States agencies until 1995.
A plain educational schematic; it does not diagnose a condition or replace professional care.
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Did the CIA really study remote viewing?
Remote viewing is clairvoyance turned into a protocol. A viewer is given only a set of map coordinates, or told that a colleague has gone to a place chosen at random, and then says or draws whatever comes to mind. Afterwards a judge is shown the description and several possible sites and asked which one it fits. If descriptions are matched to the right site more often than chance allows, the session counts as a success.
The method was developed at the Stanford Research Institute by the physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, with the artist Ingo Swann. Critics showed early that the transcripts given to judges held clues to the order of the targets, and that descriptions were loose enough to fit many places.
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What sets Remote Viewing apart
Remote viewing differs from the clairvoyance of the parlour in being a written procedure with roles: a viewer, a monitor who asks questions, a target chosen at random and a judge who matches descriptions to sites. The claim stands or falls on the judging. Free descriptions are rich in shapes and feelings and poor in checkable facts, so the same transcript can be scored as a hit or a miss depending on what it is laid beside.
- Devised: Stanford Research Institute, California, from 1972
- Researchers: Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, physicists, with Ingo Swann
- First paper: Nature, 1974
- Key criticism: Marks and Kammann, 1978: cues in the transcripts shown to judges
- Funding ended: 1995, after an outside review
Often mistaken for something else: An out-of-body experience is felt as leaving the body and travelling; a remote viewer claims no journey, only impressions that arrive while sitting awake in a chair.
The story behind Remote Viewing
Work began in 1972 with money from the Central Intelligence Agency, and a paper in Nature in 1974 brought it to public notice. David Marks and Richard Kammann published their criticism of the judging in 1978. The programme passed to the army and the Defense Intelligence Agency under a series of code names, the last being Stargate, and kept a small unit of viewers at Fort Meade in Maryland. A review in 1995 ended it.
Why Remote Viewing matters
Remote Viewing is the best funded test any such claim has had, so its outcome weighs more than a parlour demonstration.
How to read Remote Viewing
The term covers both the laboratory procedure and the courses now sold in its name; only the first was ever tested under controls.
Remote Viewing in practice: an example
A viewer describes water, a tall structure and wind. Set beside six photographs, the description fits a harbour, a dam and a bridge about equally.
Where readings of Remote Viewing go wrong
Courses that sell remote viewing as a skill rest on a programme its own sponsors closed as of no practical use.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- remote viewer, psychic spying, coordinate remote viewing, remote viewing experiments
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
Did the CIA really study remote viewing?
Yes. The agency funded the first work at the Stanford Research Institute from 1972, and military intelligence continued it. The files were declassified after the programme was closed in 1995.
Does remote viewing work?
The 1995 review found that it had never produced intelligence that could be acted on. Both reviewers agreed the laboratory scores were above chance. One judged an effect established and the other judged it unproved; the results have not been independently repeated.
Who coined the term remote viewing?
It came out of the Stanford Research Institute work of the early 1970s and is usually credited to the artist Ingo Swann together with the physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ.
