A few weeks ago I wrote about the UK Military’s Use of Remote View­ing for Spy Oper­a­tions. Well it turns out that some US Remote View­ers feel that the exper­i­ments con­ducted by the UK are pure hogwash…Read on.

A psy­chic spy who par­tic­i­pated in the Pentagon’s remote view­ing pro­gram from 1983 until 1990 claims that the British Min­istry of Defense remote view­ing stud­ies of 2002 had more holes than Swiss cheese.

Major Paul H. Smith, cur­rently Pres­i­dent of the Inter­na­tional Remote View­ing Asso­ci­a­tion (www.irva.org) said: “The British media uni­formly got it wrong. They reported stuff that wasn’t in the report. They reported things that were not said that actu­ally were in the report.“

Major Smith, a retired U.S. Army offi­cer, was one of the first mem­bers of the U.S. mil­i­tary recruited for the Pentagon’s remote view­ing stud­ies. He recalled that when he was recruited into the U.S. Army’s remote view­ing pro­gram, “It was like that scene from Men in Black.’” Major Smith is the author of Read­ing the Enemy’s Mind: America’s Psy­chic Espi­onage Pro­gram.

Accord­ing to the BBC and other media out­lets in the U.K., researchers under con­tract to the Min­istry of Defense in 2002 tried to recruit psy­chics who adver­tised on the Inter­net. “That’s what the news reports said. What really hap­pened was this: The researchers tried to con­tact 12 peo­ple who claimed to be remote view­ers,” said Smith who was not asked to par­tic­i­pate in the project despite his exper­tise. “I may have been asked by some­one using a cover story that was so vague, I had no idea what he really meant,” Smith said.

Of the 6 self-described remote view­ers who responded, “none showed any inter­est in par­tic­i­pat­ing” and the remain­ing 6 allegedly never responded to the query, accord­ing to him.

In seek­ing out expe­ri­enced remote view­ers for the MoD research pro­gram, Smith alleged that British researchers who used sloppy recruit­ment cri­te­ria. Thus, “recruit­ing remote view­ers of the inter­net because their web­sites say they’re remote view­ers is a sure-fire recipe for ques­tion­able success.“

A BBC Report of Feb­ru­ary 23, 2007, quoted a Min­istry of Defense spokes­woman as say­ing, “The study con­cluded that remote view­ing the­o­ries had lit­tle value to the MoD and was taken no fur­ther.” How­ever, if inad­e­quate mea­sures were taken to ensure sen­si­ble recruit­ment and pro­to­col for the study, how can the results be fairly assessed? Said Smith, “When you put some­thing together with peo­ple who didn’t know what was going on, they did not have a good grasp of the pro­to­col.” He fur­ther alleged that the remote view­ing researchers did not appear to have read such clas­sic ref­er­ence works as Mind-Reach by Rus­sell Targ and Hal Puthoff or the stud­ies reviewed in the Jour­nal of Parapsychology.

In fact, the pro­to­col was flawed because the MoD pro­gram was based on a report down­loaded from the inter­net. A report that was never intended to serve as a model for beginners.

After review­ing a 168-page declas­si­fied report released under the British Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act, Major Smith learned that the man­ual in ques­tion was, in fact, one that he wrote in 1986. “The Coor­di­nate Remote View­ing man­ual I wrote while assigned to the Defense Intel­li­gence Agency was never intended to be used to guide exper­i­ments,” Smith said. “It was intended to help train view­ers in apply­ing prac­ti­cal remote view­ing skills, rather than for research.“

In defend­ing his man­ual as a use­ful one for oper­a­tional tasks, he said, “That man­ual wasn’t meant for train­ing.” Although the man­ual was based on solid research by Ingo Swann, Hal Puthoff, Rus­sell Targ and oth­ers who par­tic­i­pated in remote view­ing research at SRI Inter­na­tional in Palo Alto, Cal­i­for­nia in the 1980s, Major Smith main­tained that had MoD pro­gram lead­ers actu­ally read the Coor­di­nate Remote View­ing man­ual, they would have known it was designed for oper­a­tions not pre­lim­i­nary studies.

The Min­istry of Defence remote view­ing exper­i­ments which cost British tax­pay­ers 18,000 pounds ster­ling asked blind­folded vol­un­teer sub­jects who were kept in a secret loca­tion to describe the con­tents of sealed brown envelopes. These con­tained pho­tos of a knife, Mother Theresa, and an “Asian indi­vid­ual.” Per­haps an image of a dead par­rot would have yielded more suc­cess­ful results.

Major Smith observed that although the MoD report con­cluded that 28 per­cent of these ses­sions pro­duced pos­i­tive find­ings, the British media made fun of the study. Which is too bad, accord­ing to Smith. Despite the lack of a proper research pro­to­col, a 28 per­cent suc­cess rate has sign­f­i­cance for future research. He said, “Even though they had 18 ses­sions which is a drop in a bucket for a project like this, and they had no trained sources and used naive sources who had not done remote view­ing before, the report con­cludes this study gives a base­line for how inex­pe­ri­enced view­ers func­tion. They can com­pare that in future research with expe­ri­enced viewers.“

Although the offi­cial state­ment from MoD is that “remote view­ing has lit­tle value,” Major Smith noted that the report was not dis­mis­sive of the exper­i­ments. Given the find­ings, he hypoth­e­sized that per­haps more research was con­ducted within MoD. How­ever, he added, “It’s pos­si­ble some­one at HQ said, ‘This is just silly.’”

Not silly, how­ever, is the ongo­ing neg­a­tive pub­lic­ity about remote view­ing on both sides of the pond. The C.I.A. closed the door on remote view­ing pro­grams in 1995, despite a 12-year record of sig­nif­i­cant sci­en­tific progress. “The prob­lem is that most sci­en­tists will see what they believe, rather than believe what they see,” said Rus­sell Targ, a physi­cist who helped to pio­neer the United States research program.

The neg­a­tive report­ing of this and other para­nor­mal stud­ies in Great Britain is con­tra­dicted by its own his­tor­i­cal inter­est in this field. The Royal Soci­ety for Psy­chi­cal Research was founded in 1880 and con­tin­ues today. The Koestler Para­psy­chol­ogy Unit at the Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh is one of the most respected para­nor­mal research insti­tu­tions in the world. Perrot-Warrick Research Unit at the Uni­ver­sity of Hert­ford­shire is also respected for its sci­en­tific research into psi phe­nom­ena. ” The U.K. is fur­ther ahead on the power curve than the U.S. Europe has more seri­ous lab­o­ra­to­ries than we do in the States,” said Smith, adding, “The neg­a­tive reac­tion to the Min­istry of Defence study shows just how far down into the depths the pub­lic per­cep­tion of psi has got­ten in the media.“

Dr. Lau­rie Nadel is the author of Sixth Sense: Unlock­ing Your Ulti­mate Mind Power with Judy Haims & Robert Stemp­son (ASJA Press). Copy­right 2007, Viking Rain, Ltd.

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