REMOTE VIEWING by Angela T. Smith, Ph.D.

REMOTE VIEWING (RV) in its simplest definition is “the trained ability to access information from a remote geographic location using something other than the known five senses.” Remote Viewing research has been carried out by Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and the U.S. Military. The term “remote viewing” or RV was coined by Ingo Swann and Janet Mitchell at the American Society for Psychical Research in NY, in the early 1970's. Swann took the concept to SRI International in California, where he shared his methodology with SRI researchers.

The earliest written reference to remote viewing can be found in an IEEE 1976 paper written in 1976 by Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ and entitled “A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances. They wrote:

“As observed in the laboratory, the basic phenomenon appears to cover a range of subjective experiences variously referred to in the literature as autoscopy (in the medical literature); exteriorization or dissociation (psychological literature); simple clairvoyance; traveling clairvoyance or out-of-body experience (parapsychology literature); or astral projection (occult literature). We choose the term “remote viewing” as a neutral descriptive term, free from prior associations and bias as to mechanism.”
Remote viewing in its simplest definition is “the ability to access information from a remote geographic location using something other than the known five senses.” The term, remote viewing, according to professional RVers was developed to describe a particular type of experimental protocol or “controls”. Many of the professionals, who were trained by Swann, refer to their methodology as Controlled Remote Viewing or CRV. Other RV groups teach variations of the more formal CRV, and refer to their methods as either Technical or Scientific Remote Viewing.

COORDINATE REMOTE VIEWING (Coordinate RV) was developed at SRI. Using random numbers and geographic coordinates, adept remote viewers such as Ingo Swann were able to identify remote geographic locations. It appears that a random set of numbers, as well as geographic coordinates, are sometimes all that are needed to access the information about a distant location or event.

So, RV is the trained ability to describe details and perceptions in and around any geographical location. It can be used for many different applications including finding locations/ missing persons. The ability varies somewhat between individuals and is trainable. It is not 100% accurate although most sessions may provide accurate bits of information. All types of RV can be improved by a group effort, if set up correctly. The process of training involves the learning and following of protocols, and the strict application of methodology. This process involves learning one's own strengths and capitalizing upon them. The established format is known as Controlled RV (CRV).

CONTROLLED REMOTE VIEWING (CRV) was developed by Ingo Swann as a particular type of experimental protocol or “control”. Many of the professionals, who were trained by Ingo Swann, refer to their protocols as CRV. Other RV groups teach modifications of the more formal CRV, and refer to their methods as Technical Remote Viewing (TRV) and Scientific Remote Viewing (SRV).

EXTENDED REMOTE VIEWING (ERV) is another method of remote viewing used to access information about hidden targets. ERV, in its simplest definition, is the access of hidden information using an altered state of consciousness. ERV is usually carried out with a Monitor. The Monitor is usually “blind”, that is they do not have information about the target. Their role is to elicit verbal information from the viewer, keep them on task, and in the correct ERV state. ERV and CRV can both be carried out, by an experienced viewer, without a Monitor. Extended Remote Viewing or ERV was developed at the Fort Meade Remote Viewing Unit by F. Holmes (Skip) Atwater. ERV generally requires a Monitor to help the viewer stay in the requires state of consciousness and to guide the viewer towards the target. Joe McMoneagle, in particular, frequently gives live demonstrations of RV of a very high quality, together with talks, articles, and books. He does not offer training and has more or less superseded the use of accepted RV structures, preferring to use an evolved and more personal action that cannot easily be described. Extended Remote Viewing according to Joe McMoneagle is RV performed "in an altered state of consciousness." During this time the target is accessed and information obtained about the target. According to the original ERV trainer at the Fort Mead Unit, Skip Atwater, Extended, in this respect, means the length of time that the viewer was in an altered state and accessing the target. Currently, ERV has come to have a generic definition ie. any Remote Viewing that is done within a defined protocol, in an altered state of consciousness. ERV is classically carried out with a Monitor who helps the viewer maintain the required altered state and, using information already accessed by the viewer, gives the viewer Movement exercises to move around the target and access further information. The Monitor does not ask leading questions and is usually "blind" to the identity of the target. ERV can be performed solo by experienced remote viewers. Anything that is called RV usually uses an established methodology of CRV or ERV or one of its close variants. However they were doing RV at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) before CRV or ERV were ever developed. I like to talk of a "generic RV" that basically leaves the method up to the individual. Some of these approaches work, and some don't--but they generally aren't structured the way CRV is, for example.

ASSOCIATIVE REMOTE VIEWING (ARV) is often used when a target contains ambiguous or emotional material that is difficult to remote view. Targets that contain letters or numbers or has an outcome that causes a “conflict of interest” in the viewer can be difficult to view. In this case a type of viewing called Associate Remote viewing or ARV is used. Material objects are used to represent possible outcomes to a situation. For example - an apple might represent a stock that had risen in value and a shoe to represent the fall of the stock on a certain day. In this method, a colleague chooses two or more objects to represent the possible outcomes of the situation that has been chosen. The colleague keeps knowledge of these objects hidden from the viewer. The remote viewer attempts to view the outcome of the situation by drawing or modeling one of the objects. When the outcome is known, the colleague hands the viewer the object that represents the result and the object is compared to the viewers perceptions.

Associative Remote Viewing (ARV) is the application of RV to attempt to foretell a question with multiple outcomes (one out of two or three possible answers) it's open for anyone to use because the Associative aspect acts as a filter within itself. It is typically used with Stocks and Stock Futures. There are only a few groups that have used this method successfully over an extended period of time but many others have used it in controlled experiments, including the raising of monies for good causes.

Possibly the most relevant example of general ARV use is described in a 1995 article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration by Dr Russell Targ, because this paper is a back copy in the JSE my rendition follows: It seems that RV can be used to look through both Space and Time and it is the Time element only that ARV is interested in, it is necessary to minimize the former. ARV works by Remote Viewing a 'pool' of 2 or 3 items, one of which only will be shown to the viewer at the allotted time exactly. It is entirely possible to RV the alternate item by mistake so precautions are taken to keep this hidden. Accidentally RV'ing the non-time dependent item is know as Displacement. Lets take a real life application. The correspondent does all the work except the RV'ing. He does not say if the results constitute a correct prediction. All the RV'er ideally knows is how successful he has been in general terms. The correspondent has chosen a stock futures contact. He arranges for a third person to select two suitable every day items for RV'ing that present similar amounts of entropy and possibly flatter the RV'ers personal abilities to work on. But remain two completely different every day items blind to both the Rv'er and the correspondent. The correspondent then sends a message to the RV'er and asks him to RV a particular future date and time. This is the only cue that the RV'er has and no coordinates are supplied. Meanwhile the correspondent has assigned randomly an UP designation to one item and a DOWN designation to the other item. The RV'er accumulates all his information for the requested future date and packages it up and send it off to his correspondent. The correspondent then decides if one of the item's has been successfully described. This should occur a majority of the time. If one session is considered good enough scoring 4 or more in a system between 0-7 and coincides with the UP designation that was previously randomly allotted to that photograph then the correspondent invests in the Contract on behalf of the RV'er with the expectation that it will go up in value. The UP and Down arrows allotted to the every day items can take account of Stop Losses and any manner of caveats, the intention to do this might be 'made real' by the correspondent taking time to write it down as a complete sentence. So for example the UP arrow may only be valid for a rise of a certain amount over a certain time period. In the case that the item coupled with the UP designation was RV'ed then two totally separate actions take place. Action 1, Money is invested in this stock futures contract for a particular time span (as per the question). Action 2, At the end of the trade the actual direction of the contract that occurred is matched up with the item that describes its behavior (its designation). This item or photo is sent off to the RV'er so it can be revealed at the exact time and date previously arranged. The photo is always the one that matches the resulting designation and not necessarily the expected one as Remote Viewed. The Rv'er never knows anything more but obviously should recognize any similarities between the photo and the result of his earlier RV session. Displacement can occur because there is a time that the correspondent must compare the two photo's. The judging takes place after the RV'er has sent in his description.

PSYCHOKINESIS (PK) is a related phenomenon which refers to the ability to alter the outcome of random events by using thought and/or visualization. This effect is very small and has practical uses in distant healing. Like RV it appears to operate completely independent of time. Using PK to alter past events is called Retro PK and altering the outcome of events that have not happened yet is the logical counterpart; if knowledge of the random sequence takes place then Retro PK does not work and this topic is explored in the books Schrodingers Cat/ Kittens. There is a possibility that Retro PK is used somehow to feed information back in time into the mind of the active RV'er. There are other contenders for an explanation but the neutral-receptive link of the RV'er would tend to support this hypothesis but it's just a convenient theory held by some and nothing more. RV & PK therefore share some interesting similarities and cast doubt on the concept of time as we know it. One important caveat exists as far as I'm aware and it's that the ability to Remote View the future has not been proven to work with long term reliably. Nevertheless many successful people are working on this, some full time and my own opinion is that it is possible to RV the future with the same accuracy as any other time dependent state i.e. less than 100% of the time. Attempts to gain 100% accuracy using a logical/ statistical approach have always failed. Unfortunately this raises the mute point that a future occurrence is partly pre-defined or self-realized.

ANALYTIC OVERLAY (AOL) refers to a phenomenon whereby the subconscious mind leaps to an inference regarding a target before all the appropriate data has been accessed. The part of the brain involved is the subconscious and to a lesser extent the right brain and the temporal lobes. Parts of the brain involved in pattern recognition are unreliable for RV, giving gestalt ideas that need to be filtered out; this is referred to collectively as Analytical Overlay, nevertheless RV can be done anywhere, in a train, in a crowded room in front of Television cameras or on a Stage where training should act to intercept these perceptions in the raw state. What would perhaps be better to say is that the left brain has the task of drawing conclusions about things, but in RV these conclusions are not always correct. Most people try to reach a calm state before starting a session. One way to do this is to listen to Baroque music, this is available by searching an index of music using simply the word 'Baroque'.

TELEPATHIC OVERLAY (TO). Telepathy is a known phenomenon so any possibility of telepathy taking place should be removed during RV practice. In practicing RV this is simply accomplished by the automated random selection of targets by a pure random stream which keeps details hidden, or the random placing of targets into sealed envelopes, where an individual or an audience can chose an envelope for the subject to RV, pending its contents being revealed at a later date. Any (pseudo) random generator is fine for either practice or ARV. Clearly, if you ask a person to draw a single picture and hide it then it takes 'only' telepathy to redraw the persons original sketch. There is some evidence that Uri Geller can invert this process by planting into the subjects' mind the picture he intends to draw and can therefore prepare the drawing in advance but this is not precognition as I understand it. Lastly but not least it is generally important not to Front Load the viewer with information cued to the target but sometimes this is unavoidable and may be useful for early training sessions.

FEEDBACK . Most targets have feedback available. Most remote viewers benefit from being given feedback from their target. However, accurate remote viewing can occur without the viewer being given feedback. In some cases it is clearly impossible to validate the RV concerning other Worlds until this information becomes known. Attempts to do this have in the past have brought ridicule because of the failure to pre-define the feedback and not necessarily through the absence of feedback. So presence or absence of feedback does not define remote viewing. Learning remote viewing, and verifying accurate remote viewing does require feedback. One can, theoretically, RV the future or other worlds with accuracy. However, without feedback you will never know for sure whether you were accurate or just exercising your imagination. The issue with "other worlds" is that without any sort of feedback, you cannot even know if those other worlds even exist. And if you RV a non-existent target, you run the risk of getting telepathic overlay from the Tasker, who presumably thinks the non-existent world exists. You end up telling him what he already (but falsely) believes! To avoid confusion the best way to look at it is to realize that where the feedback itself is not properly established at a future date, then the feedback is speculative and includes grey areas, leading to the near impossibility of 'proving' results. So whereas RV without feedback is possible it is certainly not provable without unbiased investigation and irrefutable proof of what exactly the feedback is or was meant to be. In a nutshell, RV brings back time independent information from a putative MATRIX. The term Matrix was originally coined by Ingo Swann. At the time it was just a convenient way of expressing a mental construct.

LOCAL SIDEREAL TIME (LST). Doctor James Spottiswode analyzed a series of remote viewing databases and, as an established statistician and scientist, was able to provide some findings that were statistically significant. Dr James Spottiswode has correlated many thousands of general RV sessions in the Northern Hemisphere including Europe, Canada and the USA and the Effect Scores they produced. A high effect score typically indicates a more accurate RV session. His findings showed that RV at 13.00 Local Sidereal Time (LST) are 300-400% more accurate whilst those completed at 18.00 LST were much LESS accurate - than the average. Sidereal Time is simply the time that our galaxy are in a particular place relative to the viewer. So at hrs relative to the viewer the solar system is always at the same overhead configuration. The sessions analyzed showed significant LST results irrespective of whether the RV was being used for ARV purposes or not and are broadly but not exactly in line with his established findings whilst patterns concerning Moon Phases and Solar Wind are not quite statistically significant.

FUTURE MEMORY. Like a fly-fisherman casting his lure into the water, Van Avery (1981) suggests sending conscious thought ahead of the event that is to be accessed and then perceiving the images that arise. Future Memory combines imagination with the memory recall system. By incorporating normal memory and shifting consciousness to the future, Van Avery believes that anybody can be vividly aware of future events. Van Avery feels it is important to become aware of your own personal way of keeping track of information in your head. He stresses keeping records of your progress through these exercise and to draw the targets with lots of detail. When viewing a target notice patterns and shape rather than function. Van Avery feels that the hardest part of these exercises is changing your belief system to accommodate the fact that these skills are possible.

In Summary.

1.) You can RV an event or location that has not happened yet or one that happened very long ago or one happening, the more entropy or 'emotional impact' - the better the results, this is a useful part of a training strategy. This involves the exact description of feelings, colors, visuals, aesthetics in a predefined order in and then - around the designated target. Remote Viewing operates independently of time and space.

2.) You can RV this location BEFORE the location has been randomly chosen i.e. precognitively.

3.) When RV'ing cued targets it is possible to surpass any photograph and go to the actual geographical location itself. This is actually not more advanced. It's just a difference in intention. If the viewer is determined to remote view the photo (RV his/her feedback, in other words), that's what will happen. If instead he/she has the intention to RV the actual target then they will learn to do that!

4.) You can RV information that has not been established yet, for example, an assignment may be a geographical location such as a hostage situation but the RV information that comes back could typically include unknown information. This is where the military application has, historically, been most useful

5.) Targets are typically cued blind, when self Rv'ing an un-cued target you should stipulate both time and location combined.

6.) RV'ing targets that are near to another area with more impact to the individual viewer can cause Displacement, that is, you may view a target close to or near in terms of time and space, rather than the actual target.

[FAQ] [ Class Info]