Remote view­ing is essen­tially ESP (extrasen­sory per­cep­tion) done sys­tem­at­i­cally through learn­ing spe­cial train­ing tech­niques. It was used by the CIA. To learn and get into the “how to” requires tech­ni­cal and sci­en­tific training.

Remote view­ing is in fact so pow­er­full, it was employed by the CIA. Basi­cally remote view­ing (RV) refers to the attempt to gather infor­ma­tion about a dis­tant or unseen tar­get using para­nor­mal means or extra-sensory per­cep­tion. Typ­i­cally a remote viewer is expected to give infor­ma­tion about an object that is hid­den from phys­i­cal view and sep­a­rated at some dis­tance. The term was intro­duced by para­psy­chol­o­gists Rus­sell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974.

In 1972 Stan­ford Research Insti­tute (SRI) laser physi­cist Hal Puthoff tested remote viewer Ingo Swann, and the exper­i­ment led to a visit from two employ­ees of the CIA’s Direc­torate of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy. The result was a $50,000 CIA-sponsored project.

The ini­tial CIA-funded project was later renewed and expanded. A num­ber of CIA offi­cials includ­ing John McMa­hon, then the head of the Office of Tech­ni­cal Ser­vice and later the Agency’s deputy direc­tor, became strong sup­port­ers of the program.

A strug­gle between unbe­liev­ers and believ­ers in the spon­sor orga­ni­za­tions pro­vided much of the “how to” train­ing program’s actual drama. Each side seems to have been utterly con­vinced that the other’s views were wrong.

In the early 1990s the Mil­i­tary Intel­li­gence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soys­ter, appointed an Army Colonel, William John­son, to man­age the remote view­ing unit and eval­u­ate its objec­tive use­ful­ness. Accord­ing to an account by for­mer SRI-trained remote-viewer, Paul Smith (2005), John­son spent sev­eral months run­ning the remote view­ing unit against mil­i­tary and DEA tar­gets, and ended up a believer, not only in remote viewing’s valid­ity as a phe­nom­e­non but in its use­ful­ness as an intel­li­gence tool.

After the Democ­rats lost con­trol of the Sen­ate in late 1994, fund­ing declined and the pro­gram went into decline. The project was trans­ferred out of DIA to the CIA in 1995, with the promise that it would be eval­u­ated there, but most par­tic­i­pants in the pro­gram believed that it would be terminated.

Remote view­ing was pop­u­lar­ized in the 1990s, fol­low­ing the declas­si­fi­ca­tion of doc­u­ments related to the Star­gate Project, a 20 mil­lion dol­lar research pro­gram spon­sored by the U.S. Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment to deter­mine any poten­tial mil­i­tary appli­ca­tion of psy­chic phe­nom­ena. The pro­gram was ter­mi­nated in 1995, appar­ently cit­ing a lack of doc­u­mented evi­dence that the pro­gram had any value to the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity. Accord­ing to expert remote view­ers who worked with the CIA how­ever, the very con­tro­ver­sial pro­gram was ter­mi­nated because peo­ple high up in the U.S. gov­ern­ment were afraid that remote view­ing could be used against them.

One of the early exper­i­ments was lauded by pro­po­nents as hav­ing improved the method­ol­ogy and tech­niques of remote view­ing sci­en­tific test­ing and as rais­ing future exper­i­men­tal stan­dards, but also crit­i­cized as leak­ing infor­ma­tion to the par­tic­i­pants by inad­ver­tently leav­ing clues. Some later exper­i­ments had neg­a­tive results when these clues were eliminated

Remote view­ing, like other forms of extra-sensory per­cep­tion, is gen­er­ally con­sid­ered as pseu­do­science due to the need to over­come fun­da­men­tal ideas about causal­ity, time, and other prin­ci­ples cur­rently held by the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity, and the lack of a pos­i­tive the­ory that explains the out­comes. Nev­er­the­less though, while the “hows” of remote view­ing are still not under­stood well, what is known for sure is that it works.