As I was looking through the remote viewing articles I bookmarked over the past few months to clear all that backlog, I stumbled upon this. I don’t think I’ve shared this historical account of remote viewing with you yet. Paul Smith wrote a highly detailed account on the beginnings of remote viewing and I found it a very informative and enjoyable read. I thought you might too.
Remote Viewing — A History
Remote viewing (RV) did not spring into existence overnight. Its earliest ancestors can be traced back thousands of years to the days of the early Greeks and beyond. But RV’s most direct precursors date from the 1930’s, beginning with experiments in clairvoyance under conscientious scientists like J.B. Rhine. Research into telepathy and “thought transference” by notables such as Upton Sinclair (described in his book Mental Radio) and Rene Warcollier (Mind to Mind), together with investigations into out-of-body states contributed further to developments that would eventually produce remote viewing.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, out-of-body experiments were conducted in New York City by researchers at the American Society for Psychical Research. One of the subjects of these experiments was Ingo Swann, an artist and student of the paranormal who had come to New York years before from Colorado. Tiring of the standard research protocols, Swann suggested a number of changes in and improvements to the experiments, which among other things led to a successful series of attempts to mentally describe the current weather in various cities around the US. After Ingo’s descriptions, the weather conditions in these cities were verified by a phone call to a weather station or other reliable authority.
