Mike Jamieson, is a well known researcher and the for­mer MUFON state sec­tion direc­tor for Napa County in California.

This arti­cle is the first of his three-part series on remote view­ing from the REALITY uncov­ered Fea­tured Writer Series.

Part One — A His­tory of Remote Viewing.

Adop­tion of the term “Remote Viewing”

The devel­op­ment of a process and capac­ity that would later be called “remote view­ing” was essen­tially due to a sequence of cir­cum­stances and events involv­ing a self-described “ordi­nary” man whose voca­tion was as an artist and aspir­ing writer.

Ingo Swann meant ordi­nary in the sense that he was NOT a psy­chic (some­thing he has asserted at all stages of his life), but instead he con­sid­ered him­self to be a “con­scious­ness researcher” with an abil­ity to occa­sion­ally enter altered states of consciousness.

Swann’s friend­ship and exper­i­men­tal work with Cleve Back­ster and oth­ers (such as ASPR leader Dr. Gertrude Schmei­dler) would lead to him being invited to be a part of exper­i­ments that were orga­nized by Dr. Karl Osis, direc­tor of research at the Amer­i­can Soci­ety for Psy­chi­cal Research.

Back­ster was (and still is) a well known poly­graphist whose early work in using poly­graph equip­ment to detect plant sen­si­tiv­ity to human thoughts and emo­tions was chron­i­cled in a pop­u­lar book, The Secret Life of Plants (1973) by Peter Tomp­kins and Christo­pher Bird.

In early 1971, Swann was busy in Backster’s lab send­ing “psi probes” into gasses con­tained in small metal con­tain­ers. Attached elec­trodes mea­sured whether or not these probes suc­ceeded in excit­ing the gasses. The results were mixed, so at Backster’s sug­ges­tion, Swann moved on to try­ing to affect organic mate­r­ial (from one celled ani­mals to blood and sem­i­nal fluids).

When they began work­ing with blood, it was found that Swann’s “project probes” (psy­chi­cally) con­sis­tently caused a reac­tion in blood cells. With these types of results, Swann noted: “If you think care­fully now, you might real­ize the ‘psy­chic threat’ poten­tials of this par­tic­u­lar kind of phe­nom­ena. Cleve and his small cir­cle of friends cer­tainly did. We mused these over while eat­ing junk food in the Times Square area.

If any­one knew what was going on in the world regard­ing things like this, Cleve cer­tainly did because of his exten­sive net­work of con­tacts in law enforce­ment agen­cies and within the CIA. ‘Well,’ he sud­denly blurted out through a mouth stuffed with frank­furter, ‘you’ve just done some­thing the Sovi­ets have been work­ing on for a long time.’ I didn’t quite make the con­nec­tion and asked him to explain. ‘The poten­tial of invad­ing someone’s body by mind alone.’” [1]

(There was an increas­ingly pop­u­lar book out dur­ing this time which pointed to inter­est­ing Soviet activ­i­ties in this arena: Psy­chic Dis­cov­er­ies Behind the Iron Cur­tain (1970) by Sheila Ostran­der and Lynn Schroeder. A grow­ing aware­ness that the Sovi­ets were using para­nor­mal capac­i­ties, appar­ently even in their intel­li­gence ser­vices, prob­a­bly had an impact on our own intel­li­gence ser­vices’ inter­est in this type of thing.)

In Octo­ber 1971, Swann was invited to par­tic­i­pate in exper­i­ments at the Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Psy­chi­cal Research. The exper­i­ment was staged in an upstairs room (for­merly a bed­room) that was divided into two by a par­ti­tion and it was designed to see if the sub­ject (i.e. Swann) could “go out of the body” and up about 14 feet to see what objects had been placed in a tray hang­ing 2 feet from the high ceil­ing. Swann was always hooked up with elec­trodes con­nected to a brain­wave recorder.

On the other side of the par­ti­tion was Janet Lee Mitchell, Dr. Osis’s research assis­tant.
Inter­est­ingly, Swann had no expe­ri­ence with out of the body expe­ri­ences and he did not feel any­one was capa­ble of doing this at will. But, that didn’t bother Dr. Osis who told Swann he would be paid $50/day. The way it was sup­posed to work was for Swann to try and see the con­tents of the tray and nar­rate into a tape recorder his per­cep­tions. Later, the tran­script would be com­pared to var­i­ous draw­ings by a psy­chol­o­gist (not part of ASPR) who was unaware that OOBE per­cep­tions were the focus of the experiment.

Despite some inter­est­ing early suc­cesses, Swann found the ini­tial stretch (of sev­eral weeks) dif­fi­cult going and, as a result, he pon­dered what may be inhibit­ing him. He real­ized that he was “hav­ing trouble.….articulating what I thought I was see­ing into the micro­phone. I found I had to stop ‘see­ing’, and think about how to say what I felt I was ‘see­ing’ [and] then I had to ver­bal­ize it.” [2]

Every­one agreed then to let Swann sketch what he was see­ing in his mind’s eye (in the attempts to per­ceive con­tents in the tray). A clip­board of paper and a pen were bal­anced on his knees and since any move­ments while draw­ing did not result in “arte­facts” in the brain­wave read­out, all was set to go.

(Draw­ing and writ­ing would become the stan­dard prac­tice in the later remote view­ing tasks con­ducted by covert gov­ern­ment teams. From the first to the last stages of RV efforts, typ­i­cally with the guid­ance of a mon­i­tor, either forms and shapes or words would be uti­lized to illus­trate the deep­en­ing per­cep­tions in accor­dance with the focus of each stage.)

Like was implied before, in Swann’s descrip­tion of the process of “see­ing” the con­tents of the tray, his per­cep­tions in these exper­i­ments did not seem to gen­er­ally involve a vehi­cle of con­scious­ness trav­el­ling out­side of the body.

There­fore, a new lan­guage or vocab­u­lary was adopted, influ­enced (Swann reports) by talk­ing with Mar­tin Ebon (appar­ently very aware of the Soviet scene and their use of ter­mi­nol­ogy for describ­ing enhanced per­cep­tual capac­i­ties). So instead of strug­gling to fly out of his body and view­ing the tray’s var­i­ous con­tents, Swann began see­ing the process as involv­ing what he called the “per­cep­tual fac­ul­ties of the biomind.”

In late Novem­ber 1971, Swann reports, good (albeit often par­tially suc­cess­ful) results began to emerge more con­sis­tently and by early Decem­ber results were becom­ing repeat­able and stronger. By this time, Swann’s draw­ings were more and more clearly match­ing all the var­i­ous objects placed in the tray above his head.

Need­less to say, these pic­ture draw­ings and the fre­quent matching’s with the tar­get objects not only excited the ASPR staff and board mem­bers, but caused them to deepen their con­sid­er­a­tion of actual process and design more chal­leng­ing exper­i­ments. So, they decided to try some­thing harder and def­i­nitely dif­fer­ent: to see if Swann could deter­mine the weather con­di­tions in a dis­tant city.
On Decem­ber 8, 1971, Swann was hooked up as usual and waited while his mon­i­tor (Janet) opened up a sealed enve­lope; revealed was the tar­get city of Tuc­son, Arizona.

Swann has described (in his online book on this his­tory) what hap­pened next:

And when I first heard the men­tion of ‘Tus­con, Ari­zona’, a pic­ture of hot desert flashed through my mind. But then I had the sense of mov­ing, a sense that lasted but a frac­tion of a sec­ond. Some part of my head or brain or per­cep­tion blacked out—and THERE I was.…something I would refer to years ahead as ‘imme­di­ate trans­fer of perceptions.’

So fast was the whole of this, or so it seemed to me, that I began speak­ing almost as soon as Janet had nar­rated the dis­tant site through the inter­com. ‘Am over a wet high­way, build­ings nearby and in the dis­tance. The wind is blow­ing. Its cold. And it is rain­ing hard.’ I didn’t even have time to sketch this, for it was easy enough to artic­u­late into the tape recorder.‘
’That’s it?’ ques­tioned Janet through the intercom.

‘Yeah, that’s it—only that I’m slightly dizzy. I thought this would take longer. It’s rain­ing and very cold there.’ ‘Okay’, Janet replied.…Through the inter­com I heard her dial­ing the num­ber of the weather ser­vice in Tucson.

Before I could stand up, though, Janet said through the inter­com: ‘Well, you’re right on, baby. Right now Tuc­son is hav­ing unex­pected thun­der­storms and the tem­per­a­ture is near freezing?‘[3]

This was only a first exper­i­ment of its kind (except for the much more mod­er­ate dis­tance of try­ing to see objects recently on Dr. Osis’s cof­fee table upstairs). In order to pro­vide a new descrip­tive term for this new type of exper­i­ment­ing, Swann sug­gested that the exper­i­ments be called either “remote sens­ing” or “remote view­ing”.

Dr. Osis and Gertrude Schmei­dler pre­ferred “remote view­ing”. And, that’s the term that would be used from that point on.

[1] Source
[2] Source
[3] Source

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