Claims | The alleged paranormal ability to perceive a remote or hidden target without support of the senses. |
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Year proposed | 1970 |
Original proponents | Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff |
Subsequent proponents | Ingo Swann, Joseph McMoneagle, Courtney Brown |
Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target, purportedly using extrasensory perception (ESP) or "sensing with mind".
Remote Viewing experiments have historically been criticized for lack of proper controls and repeatability. There is no credible evidence that remote viewing exists, and the topic of remote viewing is generally regarded as pseudoscience.
Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person or location that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. The term was coined in the 1970s by physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), to distinguish it from the closely related concept of clairvoyance.
Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s upon the declassification of certain documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program that had started in 1975 and was sponsored by the U.S. government, in an attempt to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. The program was terminated in 1995 after it failed to produce any actionable intelligence information.
A specific application of remote viewing, called Associative Remote Viewing (ARV) gained popularity in the last decade. ARV is a method mostly used by individuals and groups to predict future outcome of an event that has not yet occurred. Individuals use this method to make profits by predicting outcomes of sports events or stock market moves. Successful ARV making money projects include: Keith Harary and Russell Targ earned more than $100,000 by predicting changes in silver futures market in 1982, Greg Kolodziejzyk's 13-year (1998-2011) ARV experiment which yielded $146,587.30, Colorado ARV experiment. A typical ARV trial can be automated by software like ARV Studio.
In early occult and spiritualist literature, remote viewing was known as telesthesia and travelling clairvoyance. Rosemary Guiley described it as "seeing remote or hidden objects clairvoyantly with the inner eye, or in alleged out-of-body travel."