by R.J. Durant

In the late 1960s, the CIA learned that large sums of money were being spent in the Soviet Union for studies of “psychic phenomena,” and that several first-rate scientists were involved in the research. It is the business of the CIA to worry about such things, and the worry took the form of asking two questions.

First, had the Soviets made an important discovery in a field that science has traditionally rejected as nonsense? Second, was the Soviet research only disinformation, a way to confuse the CIA and make it waste resources chasing an imaginary threat? There was only one way to resolve this problem, and thus the CIA asked two physicists -- not two parapsychologists -- to investigate ESP. They were to do this very, very quietly, and of course, the CIA funding was never to be mentioned.

Physicists Dr. Harold Puthoff and Russel Targ set up shop at the prestigious Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. They gathered individuals with a reputation as “psychics,” and began to test them. The results were positive, but extremely erratic. That is, there were spectacular “hits,” but also equally spectacular failures. And nobody could predict which session would be successful.

Ingo Swann was the first among the cast of psychics, preceding even Targ. He was unique in that he had made a study of psychic phenomena and insisted on being a research associate, not simply a laboratory curiosity.

Psychic Spying

As one might guess, the focus of the research was to determine if it is possible, using “psychic” means, to gather information about distant locations: in sum, psychic spying. Swann had already shown success with what he called “remote viewing,” meaning description of places at a great distance.

One day Swann got the idea that he might be able to “view” a site if he were given only the latitude and longitude of the site. This sounded ridiculous, because everyone knew that latitude and longitude is an entirely arbitrary, man-made system for defining locations on the surface of the Earth. How could the viewer make the connection?

But Swann insisted on testing the idea, and several days later he was presented with a series of ten sites, each defined only by its latitude and longitude. These were laboriously worked out by a secretary at the research project, using an Atlas of the world.

To everyone’s surprise, the system worked. Swann was able to correctly describe seven out of ten sites on the first test. On one of the sites, Swann’s result was entirely incorrect, but he insisted that they go back and check the coordinate again. It proved to have been wrongly transcribed by the secretary. The place indicated by the coordinates Swann used matched his description!

This discovery -- the use of geographical coordinates to define the target --was the foundation of the Swann system. It also suited the CIA, because for most Soviet targets of interest all they knew for sure was the location of the site.

The Ideogram

In the course of practicing viewing by coordinates, Swann and his colleagues noticed that immediately after writing down the coordinates he would make a quick mark on the paper. This was apparently an automatic, unconscious movement of the pen, and had no obvious meaning. But after a while it became clear that these scribbles were part of the process, and the first response of the viewer to the coordinate.

Further research showed that these scribbles were in fact a very highly compressed evocation of the nature of the site located at the place defined by the coordinates. In other words, the initial scribble showed, in highly compressed form, whether the target was man-made or natural, for example.

Careful examination of Swann’s sketches also showed a progression from the initial scribble to a series of descriptions of color, temperature, texture and other similar characteristics of the site that one would find using the normal physical senses. Then there would begin a series of sketches, first two-dimensional, then three-dimensional. And following that, information would flow about the general purpose of the site, particularly if humans were using it for a specific purpose.

The initial scribble was named the “ideogram.” The progressions of data flow were called “stages.” And these stages always progressed in the same sequence, making it possible under most circumstances to know if the viewer had in fact made “contact” with the target site. This entire process is what came to be known as Coordinate Remote Viewing, or alternatively, Controlled Remote Viewing, CRV.

Are We All Psychic?

CRV was thus distinguished from traditional psychic modes. It was written down, it was systematic, and it contained internal ways to check for accuracy. But of greatest importance to the CIA – it produced useful data about places that had proven spy-proof. The funding continued.

But was this skill the province only of a handful of exceptionally endowed psychics? The SRI researchers had already settled that by experimenting with a variety of persons, from secretaries to visiting CIA dignitaries. It turns out that the basic ability is part of our shared genetic heritage.

Eventually, Swann taught an initial cadre of military-intelligence officers. The team was located at a super-secret facility at Ft. Meade, Maryland, where they began to do psychic spying, nine-to-five. And those remote viewers trained others.

In 1995 the program came out of the shadows, and the public began taking lessons from retired military viewers, who were released from most of their security restrictions. And they formed a membership organization, the International Remote Viewing Association. http://www.irva.org/

In September 1995 the CIA, responding to a query from the Senate Government Operations Committee, issued a report stating that over a period of 20 years approximately 20 million dollars had been spent in the research and development of remote viewing. However, the CIA concluded that remote viewing was "unpromising." This was greeted with cheers from the skeptics, and hoots of derision from those intimately connected with the remote viewing program. Neutral observers wondered out loud how an "unpromising" program could continue for two decades of uninterrupted patronage at a rate of one million dollars per annum.

The Theory of Remote Viewing

The explanation for how remote viewing works can properly be dignified as a theory, because it rests on an accumulation of well established knowledge in such disparate fields as quantum physics, neurology, and psychology.

The late David Bohm was a preeminent figure in the development of a mathematical description of the physical universe known as "quantum physics" or "quantum mechanics." Einstein's relativity works on the very large scale, where the traditional Newtonian physics fails, but does not work at all on the micro-scale of the atom, where Newton also falls down, and thus quantum physics was born. It is the currently received standard physics.

Many of the results of the equations of quantum mechanics are "counter- intuitive." That is, they don't make "common sense." The apparently insuperable dictatorship of time, for example, becomes meaningless in QM. A result called "quantum interconnectedness" (or non-locality) is the main reason Bohm has become associated with remote viewing. This effect -- and it is an experimentally observed effect, not just a postulate -- means that everything in the universe is connected with everything else. There is a sort of permanent linkage, each minute particle to each other, regardless of distance, and perhaps regardless of time. There is no need for an intervening medium to effect this connection. The connection exists because the particles or things exist.

So quantum interconnectedness provides the physical basis, at least in theory, for the ability to "know" everything about everything, without respect to the physical senses. Other terms for this are the "cosmic sea," or, in the technical jargon of remote viewers, "the matrix."

Of great interest is that Bohm also developed the concept of the unfolding, or systematic elucidation of information when it is accessed in the quantum mechanical sense. It begins with an infinitely tiny atom, as it were, of information, and then grows, all the while radiating information, more and more of it as the expansion continues. The initial "atom" contains all the information, but it is in extremely compressed form.

This is quite a precise description of the remote viewing process. When triggered, the initial signal is the "gestalt" of the target, in practice a very short squiggle on the paper, produced by the viewer's pen. These rude lines, or ideograms, can often be quickly identified as summations of the target site.

Then, as surely as summer follows spring, the next "stage" unfolds, this one spinning off the "tactiles," which are colors, smells, temperature, texture, and many other similar physical characteristics. Then a rough two-dimensional sketch, then better sketches, melding into three-dimensional sketches and so on, with some sessions ultimately producing abstract, intangible characteristics concerning the purpose of the site and the mind-set of individuals at the site.

Limitations of Remote Viewing

The very name "remote viewing" is a misnomer. It is rare for a remote viewer to literally “see” the target. Something akin to that happens from time to time, but in the vast majority of viewing sessions the data flows out on to the paper without the viewer experiencing anything like a vision or other mental virtual construction.

In theory, all knowledge should be available through the remote viewing process. For example, one should be able to view with equal confidence the past and the future, or the exact configuration of a set of numbers on a license plate, or each letter in a written document. It ought also to be a reliable channel for telepathy.

It may be that eventually, through further experimentation and research, all of this will become feasible. But the state of this art, to the extent that it can be demonstrated through repeated exercises, is that only the "right brain" data can be extracted. In practice, this means that remote viewing can be best used to describe a spot on this planet, or perhaps on any planet, and the structures or geological features prominent at that site, plus some abstract data pertaining to the site – though some access to persons or events is also possible. Numerical data, even our hypothetical license plate number, and most such "left brain" data, remain elusive, at best.

Talking To Aliens

That geographical sites and structures can be reliably remote viewed is a stupendous claim in itself. Success in this narrow field probably gives unwarranted bravado to reckless practitioners and enthusiastic but untutored observers. Examples of extreme claims made by a few remote viewers include dialog with extraterrestrials. We have no way of testing these claims, and the data may be the result of unconscious confabulation. Certainly, there is nothing in the known research base on remote viewing to support that purported use.

"If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" That challenge applies fairly to remote viewing. Getting rich by using remote viewing requires one of two abilities: (1) the ability to view the future, or (2) the ability to find lost objects. Neither capacity has been demonstrated as an ordinary feature of remote viewing. But both are worth a few words.

Various remote viewers have, in theory at least, viewed into the future. What they report has no way of being tested. This is in stark contrast to viewing terrestrial features, which admit to either instant feedback, or in the case of some of the intelligence targets where function was a key datum of interest, feedback in a matter of a few months or years.

A series of experiments have been carried out attempting to view the very near- term future. The target was the movement of the silver commodities "futures." These are very volatile, and one can trade daily, thus permitting many test runs and a short time horizon. Results were positive until substantial sums of money were on the line, and then became ambiguous. More such tests are underway at the moment.

Finding lost items or people presents huge problems. This has vexed remote viewers from the outset. Note that the remote viewing protocol consists of first giving an "address," and then letting the preconscious processing produce a flow of data about that address. What happens when you know the nature of the target, but not the address? This turns the process upside down.

Nevertheless, the remote viewing process seems flexible enough to permit some degree of this sort of search. Military remote viewers successfully used this modality in locating several missing persons, most notably General Dozier in Italy , and three hostages held by Iran subsequent to the invasion of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran .

Summing Up

Coordinate Remote Viewing is a discovery of immense importance. It subsumes and reduces to practical use a great variety of other "psychic" phenomena known by a multitude of names since antiquity, and that have been an accepted though ill-understood part of every culture except modern European reductionist materialism. Ironically, the tools of mechanistic science unlocked the door to this new modality of perception, and did so with funds and impetus drawn from warfare. Remote Viewing tells us that all men are not just brothers, but brothers bound in a psychic nexus, and the exploration of that central fact should properly be a prominent goal of the science of the 21st Century.

Ingo Swann taught only two students after the initial military group. Author R.J. Durant was honored to be one. In a follow-up to this article on remote viewing, next month’s Fringe section will carry an account of Durant’s remote view education.For more information on the International Remote Viewing Association please go to http://www.irva.org/ [1]