An Evaluation of the Remote Viewing Program: Operational Applications (1995) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

An Evaluation of the Remote Viewing Program: Operational Applications (1995) [pdf]

cia.gov

37 pointsmmastrac23 comments

Final Recommendation/Conclusion (from the document):

As an admitted neophyte in this area of endeavor, I categorize the field as a kind of religion, i.e., you either have "faith" that it indeed is something real, albeit fleeting and unique, or you "disbelieve" and attribute all positive results to either chicanery or pure chance.' Practicioners in the field, including those funded under government contracts, would argue with these observations, perhaps vehemently; some would argue further that the phenomenology has been verified beyond question already. This reviewer disagrees; albeit, these observations are not intended to discard the possibility of such phenomena.

"including those funded under government contracts..."

Anyone interested in Remote Viewing needs a copy of the four volume set The Star Gate Archives, covering 1972 to 1995.

https://www.lfr.org/book-store

That is Ed May's site. Ed was the project manager for many years.

Every year some new politician would show up and question the funding. They knew if they showed the politician how it worked they would go back to DC thinking it was just some trick. So each new politician they taught them the protocol and let the politician do it themselves. They got funding for another year.

I find parapsychology a very interesting field: the kind of scrutiny that is applied to its experiments is so much higher than with anything else in the social sciences - and usually the bar gets higher and higher until someone gives up, who is convinced remains convinced, who is not convinced remains unconvinced . That's fascinating.

For context: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Utts

Good take and thanks for a link I hadn’t come across in this space

I bet a lot of social sciences and psychology research would crumble if subjected to this level of scrutiny and default-skepticism. The harder sciences would probably fare better but you’d still find a lot of wishful thinking, dodgy borderline effects, p hacking, and fraud. You’d probably winnow science down to a very solid core, which would be a good thing but would leave you with a lot of math, physics, chemistry, etc. and a lot less other stuff.

I think we should accept that there is room for science and then there is room for philosophy. For instance, I find it doubtful that the answer to the question "is racism okay?" involves the reasoning "empirically, there [are|aren't] factors of intelligence/behavior/ability that denote one race from another". We can't discover facts out of thin air or from orthogonal facts, and it only serves to delude us by not acknowledging that. Before good and bad, harm and benefit, something isn't science, by definition, if it crumbles under reproduction or basic skepticism. Moral discussions, including whether this alternate culture of thinking about science is good or not, are intertwined but separate.

Race isn't a good example because the science comes down pretty firmly on the side of race being a social construct, not biological fact, for which the physical traits that denote race are not particularly significant.

An argument that racism isn't okay because race doesn't even really exist seems perfectly valid, given that most modern arguments for racism are based on intentional misrepresentations of science.

I think we pretty much agree, but it's not a scientific result to say that race is a social construct and that racists leverage science incorrectly. Someone isn't acting in the role of a scientist by making those refutations. I want to make that distinction because otherwise, people have misconceptions about what it means for something to be scientifically validated. Not to say that scientists are trying to deceive people by involving science, but in some sense deception is the result, and I feel like (no strong evidence though) that leads to its own problems.

Yes - the fact is that with the same attitude it would be very hard to have *any* kind of science, because if the default answer is "it must be wrong because it's impossible. so did you control X and Y? no? you see, you are a fraud". If it was applied to Newton's law, I fear they would still be debating the weight and color of the famous apple.

(not taking a position on the contents here, just on the social process).

I personally find parapsychology very interesting - and it's worth reading about, worst case consider it well-build scientific SF. It asks a lot of interesting questions: how do you study something where the scientist is directly entangled? how do you study something where you may have an actively hostile field of research? see e.g. https://books.google.ch/books/about/The_Trickster_and_the_Pa... who was written by Hansen on leaving the field....

Decent counterpoint, and I am aware that there are some anomalous results in the field that do not appear to be fraud or just bad design.

There’s two reasons most people dismiss this stuff. Well three really but the third is less scientific.

(1) There does not seem to be a way to reliably isolate, repeat, or amplify the phenomenon. Something always at the edge of detection that can never be pinned down is often indicative of error or a hypothesis that’s off the mark.

(2) We cannot possibly imagine a natural mechanism that would explain this stuff without a lot of very soft SF hand waving. Entanglement does not transfer information. The brain only consumes an average of about 30-40 watts of power, so it’s not firing particle beams. The human body does not emit EM or RF to any meaningful degree and is pretty non-responsive to it. Some of the results are so weird that you’d have to posit actual magic or the universe being a simulation or some wholly absolutely unknown realm of physics.

The last less scientific reason is:

(3) There have been a lot of fakes in this field and historically it’s associated with cults, occult weirdos, religious nuts, etc. These are people scientists generally scoff at with some legitimate reason.

About (1), that's what Rhine did his whole life. Of course, it's all "debunked" - at the end you either trust what he did or think he was a fraud.

About (2), I don't think it is really relevant, as long as there is (1). My main doubt here is: if there is a way to obtain some advantage out of it, why isn't evolution using this extensively? life is usually pretty good at exploring all possible paths. But maybe it does, and once we "see" it, it is everywhere.

For point (3), someone suggests this is structural, and that liminality/trickster effects are the very thing we are talking about. Thence (1). If you are interested, I suggest checking out the book on Trickster - and also Jacques Vallee's "Messengers of deception".

Personally, I'm not sure what to make of all this, but it is very fascinating.

I've look into this subject at some length, the bar does appear very, very high indeed. If all that is claimed were indeed true (and I suspect it is) then current 'science' is barking up the wrong tree.

Weird how psy was everywhere in the mid to late 20th century. It showed up in science fiction constantly, as if it was just going to inevitably pop up.

It does allow for trivial parallel construction: "that? oh, we got that from our psy squad"

[this century, we have both The Men who Stare at Goats and First Squad: The Moment of Truth releasing in 2009, but we do seem to have had a distinct shortage of Bigfoots and Bermuda Triangles ever since smartphones became widespread]

It did. Thought control (the advanced and fully formed secret governance of power among us) doesn’t allow this secret to be explored.

My comments and accounts keep getting banned for expressing these unfashionable ideas (even without the provocative bits.)

We are not alone in our own minds!

If we were being secretly controlled the world would be less of a shit show.

Unless they’re an even bigger shit show. Mobs of extortionists, networks in the tens of thousands, mostly bumbletard screwballs. A few elite who are as their gods.

Power is more easily developed by condemned men serving decades to life in prisons than smart successful savvy persons who live a prosperous life. They themselves are mostly pyramid schemes of extortion (these days, I am assured it was not always so.)

The things these do for fun and for profit cannot be paid for with money or be accomplished by anyone in their right minds.

You know how Americans and power are, always taking things too far, without regard for consequences.

Look at Animal domestication - see neoteny in domestic animals for eg - is a manipulative process too. People do use those techniques on each other and at mass scale via communication/advertising/marketing. Yet there are regulations and red lines and people regularly get throw in jail.

The entire time the remote viewing program was funded, the United States was actually remotely viewing their enemies and any location of interest they wanted, from space, with photos [1]. This was only recently declassified.

Funding the remote viewing program allowed the United States to bait other nation-states into funding their own paychic bullshit units, while being able to be completely misunderstood if anyone ever compromised their communications and heard them talking about "remote viewing." It also allowed for parallel construction, as another commentor in this thread mentioned.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon

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