What Is Remote Viewing? A Plain Definition
Remote viewing (often shortened to RV) is the practice of trying to gather impressions of a distant or hidden subject using only the mind. The target can be an object in a sealed envelope, a photograph, a person or a location miles away. The viewer describes or sketches whatever comes to them, and those notes are then compared with the real target.
It belongs to the family of claims called extrasensory perception, or ESP: the idea that information can reach a person without passing through the five senses. Its nearest relative is clairvoyance, the old notion of “seeing” faraway things with an inner eye. Older occult and spiritualist writing used terms like telesthesia and traveling clairvoyance for much the same idea, sometimes describing it as seeing hidden things clairvoyantly or during claimed out-of-body travel.
What set remote viewing apart was its framing. Its promoters presented it as a protocol to be tested in a laboratory, not a gift belonging to a stage psychic. So the honest short answer to “what is remote viewing?” has two parts. It is a claimed psychic ability. It is also a specific research method built to test that claim, and the method’s track record is the real story.
On the evidence, the scientific verdict is clear. No reliable scientific evidence shows that remote viewing works, and it is generally classed as pseudoscience. Supporters disagree, and their arguments are covered below.
Where the Idea Came From: From Séance Rooms to SRI
Scientific curiosity about psychic claims goes back to the mid-nineteenth century. Figures such as Michael Faraday, Alfred Russel Wallace, Rufus Osgood Mason and William Crookes ran tests on people believed to be psychically gifted. Reports of success drew heavy skepticism from other scientists.
In the 1930s, J. B. Rhine moved the study of psychic performance from star subjects to ordinary volunteers, using standardized experimental procedures. The field stayed on the fringe of science. Then the 1960s brought a counterculture sympathetic to paranormal ideas, the rise of New Age thinking and the Human Potential Movement. Interest in consciousness and psychic phenomena grew again, and so did the money available to study them. For more on that era’s preoccupations, the journal’s consciousness, dreams and the mind section covers related territory.
Targ, Puthoff and the naming of remote viewing
In the early 1970s, the physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff joined the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory at Stanford Research Institute (SRI, now SRI International). Their paranormal studies there were at first paid for privately by the Parapsychology Foundation and the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
Targ and Puthoff are generally credited with coining the term “remote viewing” to distinguish their work from clairvoyance. According to Targ, though, the phrase itself was first suggested by Ingo Swann in December 1971, during an experiment at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City, not at SRI. SRI’s subjects included Uri Geller, who was the subject of a Targ and Puthoff study there.
The founders’ backgrounds later drew scrutiny. The science writer Martin Gardner pointed out that Puthoff had been an active Scientologist, and that the Church of Scientology published a notarized letter of his praising its system while he was doing remote viewing research. Gardner also noted that Puthoff gave credence to a claim in the 1908 book Occult Chemistry that two followers of Theosophy’s founder, Madame Blavatsky, had remote-viewed the inner structure of atoms.
The Stargate Project: Two Decades of Government Psychics
For many readers, the question “what is remote viewing?” really means “what was the government doing with it?” The answer is a documented program, now known as the Stargate Project, which ran from 1975 to 1995 and cost about $20 million. Its aim was to find out whether psychic phenomena had any military or intelligence use. Its existence became widely known in the 1990s, when related documents were declassified.
That puts remote viewing in an unusual spot. Most claims on our conspiracy theories pages are rumors of secret programs. Here the secret program was real. Like the Operation Northwoods proposal, it shows how far Cold War planners were willing to go, and it has also attracted embellished legends, much like the stories surrounding the Montauk Project.
The Carter anecdote
One story is often cited in the program’s favor. In a 2005 interview with GQ, former president Jimmy Carter recalled that during his presidency the government was looking for a small twin-engine plane that had gone down somewhere in Africa. He said the CIA director told him a woman in California who claimed to be a psychic had located it. Carter said he took the claim with skepticism and added, “Whether it was just a gross coincidence or... I don’t know.” The record offers no independent confirmation beyond his recollection.
How it ended
In the early 1990s, the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by Defense Intelligence Agency chief Harry E. Soyster, appointed Army Colonel William Johnson to manage the unit and judge whether it was useful. Funding ran down in late 1994. In 1995 the project moved from the DIA to the CIA, which hired the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to review its results.
Time magazine reported in 1995 that three full-time psychics were still working at Fort Meade, Maryland, on a budget of about $500,000 a year. The AIR report concluded that the program had produced no usable intelligence. The viewers’ reports were described as vague and full of irrelevant or wrong details, and there were suspicions that project managers had sometimes edited reports to fit background cues. AIR’s David Goslin put it bluntly: “There’s no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community.” The CIA ended the program that year.
How a Remote Viewing Session Is Supposed to Work
Schools and teachers differ on the details, but the core design is simple. A useful way to understand what remote viewing is in practice is to walk through the ideal setup researchers aimed for:
- Target selection. Someone other than the viewer chooses a target, such as a photo, an object or a real place, ideally at random from a larger pool.
- Blinding. The viewer is told nothing about the target. In a well-run trial, anyone in the room with the viewer is in the dark too, so they cannot leak hints.
- The session. The viewer records impressions: shapes, textures, colors, sounds, and often rough sketches.
- Judging. An independent judge compares the transcript with several possible targets, including the real one, and ranks which fits best.
- Scoring. Over many trials, the hit rate is compared with what chance alone would produce.
In the classic SRI experiments the targets were real locations, and judges tried to match each viewer’s transcript to the right site. That detail turned out to matter a great deal.
A worked example of the problem
Here is a hypothetical session that shows why judging is the weak point. A viewer writes: “Tall vertical structure. Water nearby. Feeling of openness. Curved lines.” The real target is a bridge. That sounds like a hit. But the same notes fit a lighthouse, a fountain in a park, a harbor crane or a church spire beside a river.
Now suppose the transcript also says, “Not like yesterday’s target,” and the judge has a list of targets in the order they were used. The judge can now place the transcript in sequence and match it without any psychic signal at all. As the next section shows, this was not a far-fetched scenario.
What the Experiments Actually Found
The scientific case against remote viewing rests less on theory than on what happened when other researchers tried to repeat the results.
The clues in the SRI transcripts
The psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann tried to replicate Targ and Puthoff’s work across 35 studies and could not. They then examined the original procedure. They found that the transcripts given to judges contained clues to the order of the sessions, such as references to “yesterday’s two targets” or session dates written on the page. The psychologist Thomas Gilovich later noted that the judges had been given the list of target sites in the exact order they were used.
Targ and Puthoff declined to share their unpublished transcripts. Marks and Kammann got copies from the judge instead and found them full of cues. When the cues were removed, according to Marks, results dropped to chance. Marks himself matched the transcripts with 100 percent accuracy using the clues alone, without visiting a single site. In 1980 Charles Tart reported an above-chance result after rejudging one set of transcripts. When those transcripts finally became available in 1985, they still contained cues.
PEAR and the statistics debate
From the late 1970s, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab (PEAR) ran its own remote perception program. By 1989 it reported 336 formal trials with very strong statistics in its favor. A 1992 critique by Hansen, Utts and Markwick called the work some of “the poorest quality ESP experiments published in many years.” PEAR rejected that criticism, ran several hundred more trials with a computer-based judging method, and in 1996 reported results it considered consistent with SRI’s. Others, including some parapsychologists, identified statistical flaws.
The Utts and Hyman split
Two of the AIR review’s evaluators reached opposite conclusions. Jessica Utts argued the data showed a statistically significant effect, with some subjects scoring 5 to 15 percent above chance. The psychologist Ray Hyman called the conclusion that ESP had been proven “premature, to say the least.” He pointed out that the findings had not been independently replicated. He added that even clean results would only show that something unexplained had happened, not that psychic ability was the cause, because the field had no positive theory saying what to control for.
Other critics found further problems. C. E. M. Hansel judged the experiments “too loosely controlled to serve any useful function,” with no safeguards against fraud. Michael Shermer noted that viewers’ sketches tend to reuse a few simple forms, lines and curves, that can be read as a hit for almost anything, and he pointed to confirmation and hindsight bias. Marks, in The Psychology of the Psychic (2000), added that some Stargate work was secret and could not be peer reviewed, and that the judge, Edwin May, was also the principal investigator, a serious conflict of interest. Earlier, in the late 1970s, physicists John Taylor and Eduardo Balanovski had tested the psychic Matthew Manning and called the results “completely unsuccessful.”
| Documented | Claimed or disputed |
|---|---|
| SRI researchers studied remote viewing from the early 1970s | That those studies showed a real psychic effect |
| The U.S. government funded it from 1975 to 1995 for about $20 million | That viewers delivered useful intelligence |
| The 1995 AIR review found no usable intelligence | Utts’s view that a statistical effect was present |
| SRI transcripts contained sensory cues; cue-free replications failed | That later, tighter protocols fixed the problem |
| Carter recalled a psychic being credited with finding a downed plane | That the plane was found by psychic means rather than coincidence |
The Case for Something Stranger
Supporters make several serious points that deserve a fair hearing. First, the government did not fund the work for a weekend. It kept it going for two decades, through several agencies, which some take as a sign that officials saw something worth pursuing. Second, Utts was not a fringe figure brought in to cheer. She was one of the formal reviewers on the AIR evaluation, and she concluded that the effect in the data was real.
Third, even critics such as the psychologist Richard Wiseman, who identified information leakage in one SAIC experiment, credited that work’s process-focused approach for refining the method so that later researchers could avoid earlier mistakes. Supporters argue that this was how a young field was supposed to improve. Finally, there are the anecdotes, like Carter’s, that are hard to check either way.
The skeptics’ reply is the same each time. A long-running budget shows institutional interest, not proof. A statistical edge that vanishes when cues are removed points to a flaw, not a faculty. And without a theory explaining how information could travel this way, Hyman argued, there is no way to know what a proper control even looks like. Readers who like this sort of argument about memory and certainty may enjoy the Berenstain Bears Mandela Effect, which runs on the same mental machinery of pattern and hindsight.
Who Are the Best-Known Remote Viewers?
Because no one has shown the ability under properly controlled conditions, “best” can only mean best known. The names that come up most often:
- Ingo Swann, who according to Targ suggested the term in 1971, and who is listed among the practice’s later proponents.
- Joseph McMoneagle, another later proponent of remote viewing.
- Courtney Brown, a political scientist who founded the Farsight Institute.
- Uri Geller, studied by Targ and Puthoff at SRI.
On the other side of the ledger sit the researchers who shaped the skeptical case: David Marks, Richard Kammann, Ray Hyman, C. E. M. Hansel and Richard Wiseman, along with writers such as Martin Gardner, Michael Shermer and the neurologist Terence Hines, who all describe remote viewing as pseudoscience.
Common Mistakes and Why Remote Viewing Endures
Anyone trying remote viewing at home, or judging someone else’s claims, runs into the same traps the laboratories did:
- Leaky setups. If the person running the session knows the target, tone, word choice and body language can give it away.
- Generous matching. Vague notes like “water, vertical, open” fit too many targets to count as a hit.
- No decoys. A match means little unless the judge also compared the notes with several wrong targets.
- Remembering the hits. Striking successes stick in memory, and the long run of misses fades.
Even so, the question “what is remote viewing?” keeps coming back, and it’s easy to see why. It has a real paper trail, a Cold War setting, physicists in lab coats and a president’s puzzled recollection. It also asks one of the oldest questions on the paranormal map: whether the mind can reach beyond the body. The record says the tests failed, but the hope behind them is still there.
If you want long-form conversations about the edges of consciousness and the unexplained, the Troubled Minds Vault collects the radio show’s public back catalog. For more from the journal, the full archive is a good next stop.
So, what is remote viewing in the end? It’s a claimed ability that got rare institutional backing, then failed every time the controls were tightened. What remains unexplained is less about the targets than about the people: why careful, well-funded researchers saw signals that faded once others checked their work, and why so many people still hope those signals were real.
Questions and answers
Who was the best remote viewer?
No remote viewer has shown a reliable ability under properly controlled conditions, so nobody can be called the best. The best-known names are Ingo Swann, who according to Russell Targ suggested the term in 1971, and Joseph McMoneagle, another proponent of the practice. Courtney Brown later founded the Farsight Institute. Uri Geller was studied at SRI. The physicists John Taylor and Eduardo Balanovski tested the psychic Matthew Manning and described the results as completely unsuccessful.
How can I practice remote viewing?
Hobbyists usually have a partner pick a hidden target, often a photo, without saying anything about it. The viewer writes and sketches impressions, then the two compare. If you want the exercise to mean anything, follow what the research taught: the person running the session should not know the target either, and someone who wasn't involved should do the matching against several decoys. Without those controls, cues and generous interpretation produce hits that look impressive and prove nothing.
What is another word for remote viewing?
Older occult and spiritualist writing called the idea telesthesia or traveling clairvoyance. Remote viewing is closely related to clairvoyance, and the researchers Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff are credited with choosing the newer term partly to set their laboratory work apart from it. The broader category it belongs to is extrasensory perception, or ESP. Researchers sometimes use the more neutral phrase remote perception, as Princeton's PEAR lab did.
Is remote viewing real?
There is no scientific evidence that remote viewing works, and mainstream science classes it as pseudoscience. Early positive results from SRI fell to chance once the clues in the transcripts were removed. The government's Stargate Project ended in 1995 after an evaluation found it had produced no usable intelligence. A minority of researchers, most notably Jessica Utts, argued the data showed a real statistical effect. Independent replication never settled that dispute.
Did the CIA use remote viewing?
Yes. The U.S. government funded remote viewing research and an operational unit from 1975 to 1995 at a cost of about $20 million. The work is now known as the Stargate Project. In 1995 the program moved from the Defense Intelligence Agency to the CIA, which commissioned the American Institutes for Research to evaluate it. The review found no usable intelligence, and the CIA ended the program that year.
Stay curious. Keep the question open.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads.
