The Stanford Research Institute spent 23 years proving remote perception is real. Here is what they actually found.
On Targ, Puthoff, Ingo Swann, and the classified program that ran for two decades because it kept producing results no one could explain away.
In 1972, two physicists at the Stanford Research Institute accepted a contract from the American military to investigate something the intelligence community had reason to take seriously - the possibility that trained human beings could perceive information at a distance without any known sensory mechanism. The physicists were Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff. The first subject was an artist and psychic named Ingo Swann. The program that grew from that meeting was eventually named Stargate. It ran for twenty-three years. It was terminated in 1995, but this was not because results failed to appear.
The basic protocol was simple and precisely controlled. A remote viewer – seated in a shielded room with an experimenter, no external information available – was asked to describe a target location being visited at that moment by another team member, called the outbounder, who had been sent to a randomly selected site from a sealed pool. The viewer, having no knowledge of which site had been selected, would then describe what they perceived. Independent judges, blind to which viewer had been assigned which target, compared the transcripts to photographs of the actual sites and ranked the matches.
In the controlled SRI trials, the match rates were significantly above chance. Not slightly, and not in a single study, but across hundreds of trials with multiple viewers over years of work. Targ and Puthoff published their initial findings in Nature in 1974 – one of the most scrutinized peer-reviewed journals in science – and the paper passed peer review, a fact that was not well publicized afterward.
Ingo Swann was, by the assessment of the program researchers, the most consistently accurate viewer they worked with. In 1973, he proposed a methodological refinement called coordinate remote viewing – using geographic coordinates as the target – because it removed the possibility that outbounder body language or micro-expressions were providing unconscious information transfer. The protocol became the foundation of the training program. Joseph McMoneagle, who entered the program in 1978 as Army Intelligence operative #001, described coordinates and produced sketches of locations that matched satellite photography. Puthoff described the work as “an embarrassment of riches.”
The program was reviewed repeatedly, by the American Institutes for Research, by Congress, and by the military’s own analytical teams. The 1995 review by statistician Jessica Utts at the University of California Davis concluded that the effect was real and replicable. Her co-reviewer, Ray Hyman, a skeptic, agreed that the methodology was sound and could not identify a procedural explanation for the results. He recommended more research rather than acceptance. The program was terminated anyway, with the official conclusion that the results, while statistically significant, had not proven “operational usefulness.”
Twenty-three years. Hundreds of trials. Statistically significant results reviewed and confirmed by independent researchers. Operational deployment in intelligence contexts the full scope of which remains classified. Terminated not because it didn’t work but because the results created a bureaucratic problem that was easier to disavow than to address.
The problem was not that remote perception failed. The problem was that it succeeded in a way that had no acceptable place in the model the institution was built on. That is a different problem, and it has a different solution.
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Further Reading
Hyman, R. (1995). Evaluation of a program on anomalous mental phenomena. Journal of Parapsychology, 59(4), 321-351.
Kress, K. A. (1977). Parapsychology in intelligence: A personal review and conclusions. Studies in Intelligence, Winter. [online] Available here: https://dn760100.eu.archive.org/0/items/ParapsychologyInIntelligence/Parapsychology-in-Intelligence.pdf
McMoneagle, J. (1993). Mind Trek: Exploring Consciousness, Time, and Space Through Remote Viewing. Hampton Roads.
Puthoff, H. E. (1996). CIA-initiated remote viewing program at Stanford Research Institute. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 10(1), 63-76. [online] Available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237282216_CIA-Initiated_Remote_Viewing_Program_at_Stanford_Research_Institute
Radin, D. (1997). The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. HarperOne.
Swann, I. (1975). To Kiss Earth Good-Bye. Hawthorn Books.
Targ, R., & Puthoff, H. (1974). Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding. Nature, 252(5476), 602-607. [online] Available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/251602a0
Targ, R., & Puthoff, H. (1977). Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Abilities. Delacorte Press.
Utts, J. (1995). An assessment of the evidence for psychic functioning. Journal of Parapsychology, 59(4), 289-320. [online] Available here: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/air.html
Rumor has it they moved the operation to the black budget projects and is still ongoing.
The film "The Men Who Stare at Goats" was Hollyweird making fun of and trying to discredit this real capability of mankind.
Are you familiar with the remote viewer Elizabeth April? She has her own site and is on YouTube as well. She seems genuine and sees outrageous stuff.