CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]
cia.gov
cia.gov
For those who want a skeptical & cynical view: if remote viewing works, it would be part of the standard strategy of every hedge fund. Remember that theses are groups who pay millions for millisecond advantages in information. And you only need an ~51-55% success rate to make a killing in HFT (vs a 50% success rate from a coinflip). The fact that hedge funds don't have remote viewers on staff is evidence against RV providing utility greater than an RNG.
And for curious people who want to try a scientific approach, I suggest joining https://www.social-rv.com/ which is collecting data about RV and trying to make the experiment ironclad via blockchain authentication of predictions.
And lastly simple inability by most to perceive that, and other ESP/Psi stuff, maybe akin to so called aphantasia for people who can't visually imagine things.
Edit: Also Weapons of Class Disruption. Can't have that, ever.
None of these groups can replicate their results beyond the initial claims. This is strong evidence that positive results in RV are just due to selection bias, specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias. If those investment groups could actually replicate their results, they would still be major names and others would be actively trying to copy them since it should only take a couple of millions of dollars to find capable RV candidates.
The non-skeptical view is that if people try to predict the stock market via RV, they will interfere with the future and their prediction ability will decrease. But when weighing this hypothesis against the hypothesis that RV is just selection bias, the latter wins due to Occam's Razor.
It absolutely does not work. Not "unreliably", but not work at all.
This reminds me of that one time on HN when someone tried to convince me that ritual witchcraft (I think they called it blood magic) on servers was a real thing, necessary to make them work, and my dismissal was typical of narrow minded people.
I call upon thе blood-moon goddess for I have but one request.
I've laid the altar, charged the crystals, the circle, I have blessed.
Then make clean && make all, BOOM compiles with no errors or warnings every time.
Witchcraft.
If you will believe anything that seems true to you, because someone online said so, without any weight of evidence, and which is widely considered pseudoscience (go check)... I have a bridge to sell you.
What's with the wave of anti-intellectualism on HN of all places? Are we really trying to debate whether debunked crap like witchcraft and ESP is real? What's next, that Nigerian prince truly wants to gift you his money if only you can help him with a few dollars?
Carl Sagan must be spinning in his grave.
Examining something != believing it, it's step 2 in the scientific method, with which I advise you get familiar with before invoking it as much as you have in this thread.
If all you have to contribute to the discussion is thrashing around, maybe stay out of it?
I never made any outlandish claims and therefore the onus isn't on me to prove anything.
> Examining something != believing it
But parapschyology has been examined and tested by scientists, and none of it has been verified in independent and controlled conditions. Unlike what the other commenter claimed, there are zero documents indicating RV works. Many of its practitioners have been shown to be frauds, pranksters or cranks (Puthoff thought Uri Geller was a psychic and was fooled by sleight of hand). What new evidence is there? RV isn't a new claim; it's an old debunked claim. Have they won the Amazing Randi prize yet? They could have, if RV was real!
> If all you have to contribute to the discussion is thrashing around, maybe stay out of it?
I'm reminding participants about how the scientific method works, which is important when discussing outlandish claims.
> Maybe stay out of it
???
Jessica Utts, a well respected statistician
> Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who have recently been willing to take on this challenge have indeed found success in their experiments, as described in my original report.
Edit: Actually I did find at least one experiment-ish, which is more precognition rather than remote viewing to determine crypto coin price trends [1]. Seems 53 correct predictions, 50 incorrect predictions which is well within statistical chance.
Also seems the social-rv GP linked will eventually have a remote-viewing for real-world events prediction-market type thing. Now that's interesting, and they cleverly avoid it devolving into a traditional prediction market by introducing indirection where two images are arbitrarily assigned to the outcome (true/false) and the person RVs the image, without knowledge of which outcome that image represents.
[1] https://reddit.com/r/remoteviewing/comments/lg6sf2/precognit...
No, she isn't. She's a statistician, but mostly known for being in the panel review of Star Gate, and for close associations with parapsychology organizations.
She was already involved in parapsychology, having coauthored papers with the director of Star Gate (a parapsychologist himself) before becoming part of the review panel! You cannot have vested interests in the phenomenon being real if you're going to judge it impartially. You cannot have a relationship with one of the key personnel in the project you're reviewing, and especially not a relationship specifically about the same kind of things you're supposed to review! This is a serious flaw, she shouldn't have been part of the panel.
> There has been many reproductions
Like which ones? A reproduction must be done independently, by scientists without the same sponsors and vested interested. Can you point to these reproductions?
By the way, Star Gate was canceled with the conclusion that the experiments were inconclusive. Had there been reproductions, surely the conclusions would have been different?
social-rv is our attempt to do yet another reproduction, as publicly as possibly. And we got the same result
Please don't use the efficient capitalism argument. By that logic, if polio vaccines worked then why didn't 1940s pharma companies sell polio vaccines back when people were getting polio?
Remote viewing is bunk, but not because hedge funds in their omniscience have determined it to be unprofitable.
Because they didn't know about such a vaccine. We know that remote viewing "exists"
I think that GP's point - that, if such things exist, they would actually be utilized - is a good one. The framing might not be great but it's also not entirely relevant. You could just as easily make a non-capitalism example - like why don't fire departments use them
We are aware of remote viewing as a concept but it does not currently exist - no one has ever gotten it to work. There are very good reasons to think it can't work, but the lack of a practical implementation alone is not such a reason.
The issue is not capitalism specifically, it just frequently takes that form. Firefighters not doing something is equally fallacious proof of impossibility.
The popular ones on the "explore sessions" are a very close match, but if you look at other predictions by those accounts, they're less sure. It's very easy to form a connection between any two images if you allow abstracted forms of similarity, and fundamentally there are very limited themes when it comes to images (natural things, man-made things. Smooth vs sharp.).
A good control test might be to have LLMs produce output instead, and score that.
And this is worsened by the fact that the LLM-based auto scoring explicitly uses the last 10 as decoy targets
>When you submit a session, the system collects your last 10 targets (including the current target) to create a pool of possible matches. A multimodal AI agent is presented with your complete session (including all drawings, text, and data) along with all 10 targets from the pool. The agent is instructed to analyze and rank the targets based on how well they match the session content.
The protocol otherwise seems good, but the specific carveouts here would seem to bias results.
The source for the judging is at https://github.com/Social-RV/comparative-judging which is the part which would need to be studied carefully. At first glance, it exposes raw filenames to the LLM which might bias things. The ranking logic also seems a bit sketchy, it does some tournament-style elimination thing which I haven't analyzed thoroughly but if decoys are eliminated in an earlier round it could bias things compared to just asking the LLM to order the 10 images based on similarity in a single-pass which is obviously unbiased.
I think to counter this, you'd need to model your null hypothesis as the distribution that results when you have the LLM score a deliberately incorrect image against your target + dummies.
Some answers to your questions: - the target pool has 275 targets in it - we USED to use the last 9 targets as decoys, but changed to randomly sampling 9 targets from the pool instead several months ago. I've updated the FAQ to reflect that - the unique identifiers we show the LLM for the decoy targets is not the file name but rather the DB primary key for that target. There should be no information in it the AI could use to bias a decision - in regards to the tournament-style elimination, we have a new judge coming out soon that does a single pass. When this was originally built, the single-pass wasn't reliable enough on available models
Thanks very much for your thoughtful feedback and questions about what we're doing!
And maybe find some statistician to define a proper metric for statistical significance here, since my gut feeling is that naively using a uniform distribution of ratings as the null hypothesis isn't correct (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438181)
May 15, 1987: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00789R0017000...
May 17, 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Stark_incident
(And does it remind anyone else of an ee cummings poem or is it just me)
If you exclude H-Bomb, high powered laser, disregard the shapes don't match the USS Stark, and fixate on the coincidences -- pattern-matching, something the human brain has evolved for survival -- of course the similarities will seem impressive. This is "cold reading 101", a known trick. The average tarot reader knows how to do this.
Interestingly, we don't know of any other predictions that widely missed the mark. So if predictions 1 to 10 were made, most wildly inaccurate, but one of them vaguely/partially resembles something that happened some days after, that's not convincing to demonstrate anything but a random result. Let's say another prediction stated "calm waters, US dominance, safe passage, successful mission, happy sailors". How would we assess the accuracy of the predictive method?
For example:
1. The drawing on p. 7 looks like the superstructure of a warship.
2. The next few pages might describe what it feels like to wonder if your ship is actually under missile attack.
3. On page 10 it records "aircraft--large, multiengined; distant; orbiting; distraction controlled, directed. 'Under orders.'" This USNI article has a little more detail on the AWACS plane detecting the incoming attack: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2017/j...
There are other similarities, but the CIA report predates the attack, which is especially strange.
If you throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, some of it is going to stick. Especially when it appears to be random words that can be applicable to millions of situations.
From Jessica Utts, who was the president of the American Statistical Association and asked to review the Stanford Research Institute psychic programs (including Star Gate).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333228024_An_Assess...
https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/air.pdf
This goes into way more detail and covers Utts's work.
Assuming this is true, I have to wonder why it would be that the science community apparently places a higher burden of proof on this sort of research, and whether that higher standard has been earned or not.
RV is pseudoscience, you won't find scientific support for it, or anyone able to reproduce its purported results under controlled conditions.
The Amazing Randi probably had a challenge about RV that no con artist was able to win.
Edit: wait, it's even worse. Utts was completely biased and compromised:
> The psychologist David Marks noted that because Utts had published papers with [Edwin] May [a parapsychologist who took over Project Stargate in '85] "she was not independent of the research team. Her appointment to the review panel is puzzling; an evaluation is likely to be less than partial when an evaluator is not independent of the program under investigation."
So she was completely biased and wasn't independent of the leadership of Stargate! She had vested interests in it being "real", she was invested on RV and parapsychology!
Indeed. I'm amazed so many HN regulars are surprised by this. It's how horoscopes work, we've known this for centuries now.
Have people forgotten the scientific method, the standards of proof, etc?
It's only strange if you believe the CIA released notes from their super-secret psychic program rather than the more plausible explanation that this is disinformation that was backdated for a boost of prestige.
This is scientific method 101. Let's not pretend we're not familiar with it just because some dodgy CIA document surfaced.
There's literally extraordinary evidence in the PDF, you just don't like it.
If you want to reject the scientific method go ahead, but you won't find much sympathy here.
"Ship. Round thing. Structure. Water. Propeller."
Give me a break. Reads like the typical psychic scammers.
Reality is indeed stranger than fiction.
Also, what guarantee is there that whomever created that document didn't just date it two days prior to acquire more funding for doing spooky things?
That's how evidence works for extraordinary claims. Alas, scientific rigor is a harsh master.
There's a reason RV is considered pseudoscience.
It speaks volumes you don't see any problem with the lack of proof that the documents weren't backdated, and get defensive when people tell you this must absolutely be ruled out if we're ever to even start considering your alleged evidence.
More info:
http://shpenkov.com/pdf/microleptonsEng.pdf
Odd patent:
https://patents.google.com/patent/RU99109282A/en
I don't understand this at all.
It's like trying to understand QM before Maxwell.
This is even more surreal:
https://remoteview.substack.com/p/a-phenomenological-model-o...
If you find a believer they will worship you with no hard questions.
This is one hundred perfect my view on this, and things are more than suspicious when suddenly being asked to get into the weeds on some technical aspect these guys start citing national security to keep things vague.
He also has a history of quackery, belief in the paranormal, and being duped by Uri Geller.
I mean, he's the worst kind of crackpot: a sucker who believes magic tricks are real and will evangelize about it.
Puthoff is a crank. Of course he won't provide evidence of participating in top secret projects that produced any results: he doesn't have it. He can only speak in the vaguest terms typical of pseudoscience cranks.
If it works... well, congratulations. You now have an edge that no one else knows about.
This was due to malice not ignorance/incompetence.
Almost killed the agency
The CIA and the Bush administration claimed Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in 2003, building the case for invasion on assertions that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs and failed to comply with UN resolutions, though these claims proved to be incorrect after the invasion found no stockpiles, leading to later acknowledgments of intelligence failures...
CIA's Role: The CIA provided assessments, including classified estimates, stating high confidence in Iraq's possession of biological and chemical weapons, which formed the basis for public statements by officials...
Intelligence Failures: Investigations later confirmed that the intelligence community was "simply wrong" in its assessments, highlighting failures in analysis and sourcing, despite intelligence professionals believing their information at the time...
In summary, the CIA and U.S. government did assert the presence of WMDs, but these claims were later disproven, revealing significant flaws in the intelligence used to justify the war.
Often the intel community is dead right, but get thrown under the bus by the admin. The intel community can't really come out and say "actually what our pres is saying is false, we told him this would happen".
I think CIA analysts said no WMDs, but the CIA head personally told the President that the case for WMDs was a "slam dunk" - maybe just a kiss-ass moment, but something to learn from: those moments have consequences.
But generally not getting the answers they wanted, VP Cheney and/or SecDef Rumsfeld setup their own mini-intelligence agency in the Department of Defense which produced their desired results, including WMD and also Iraq somehow being involved in 9/11. They relied heavily on an informant that they code-named "Curveball". Seriously.
> Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who have recently been willing to take on this challenge have indeed found success in their experiments, as described in my original report.
If the phenomenon we are trying to study is somehow intelligent, then the observer effect will see to it that skeptics will never progress towards understanding until they're somehow "ready", whatever that means.
" There is little benefit in continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data. "
Which is an insane thing to say and reveals her motivated reasoning.
The one's engaged in motivated reasoning are skeptics like you and Randy who refuse to engage with the data because of, ironically, motivated reasoning. The data is clear. Either point out the flaws in the experimental protocols or consider you have some metaphysical priors to update.
"real" in that remote viewing and psychic powers actually exist? No.
The CIA researched a ton of "mind-control" techniques under MKULTRA too but that doesn't mean they can control your mind.
The government has programs to research UFOs but that doesn't mean aliens are buzzing our skies and kidnapping our cattle.
I think what we're really seeing here is just money laundering and confirmation bias.
If the attacker has physical access, assume your system is not safe.
The movie was based on the work of a journalist investigating the topic and wrote a non-fiction book on the subject.
We aren’t immune to this today, far from it, though the hoaxes have become way more believable in my assessment.
We're in an age when vaccines are treated as the enemy and the us health secretary believes paracetamol causes autism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_of_Science_and_Tec...
“ In the FY 1991 Defense Authorization Act, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was identified as executive agent for initiating a new program to investigate parapsychological/ anomalous phenomena. A funding level of $2 million was authorized for DIA to undertake specific research and other activities relative to this activity. Objectives of this authorization were to enable a systematic and scientifically sound approach to the R&D effort, to permit wider and more systematic review of potential intelligence applications, and to assess foreign developments in this area.”
It was taken serious enough to be funded for two decades starting in the 70s. Eventually it was terminated when the strategic pressure eased.
AIR was commissioned to look at the research and says in this [1]
“A three-component program involving basic research, operations, and foreign assessment has been in place for some time… beginning in the 1970s, it has conducted a program intended to investigate the application of one paranormal phenomenon — remote viewing, or the ability to describe locations one has not visited.”
“The AIR review found that remote viewing produced occasional hits that were statistically better than chance, but it remains unclear whether the observed effects can unambiguously be attributed to paranormal phenomena, and the laboratory conditions under which effects were seen do not generalize to real intelligence problems. The information provided by remote viewing was judged vague and ambiguous, making it difficult or impossible for the technique to yield information of sufficient quality and accuracy for actionable intelligence.”
1. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00791R0002001...
In government terms that's pretty small. I guess even if there's a low chance of working, the payoff if it did would be huge.
> $2,000,000 in 1991 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $4,759,500.73 today
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1991?amount=20000...
Second source: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=2%2C000%2C000....
> $4,816,077.27
Still not a lot.
The embarrassing part is that we can identify many of them already, before the historical consensus catches on.
I enjoy the subject of conspiracies and hoaxes without holding a strong personal affinity towards any particular one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories_pr...
An admiral walks in and sits down and tells you that he'd like some money to research some unidentified aircraft that are buzzing US Navy pilots. Shaped like "tic tacs", that seem to defy physical laws - they accelerate incredibly fast and seem to be able to move between air and water without damaging their structure, even at high-speed. They've been caught on camera multiple times, and pilots don't know what to make of them.
You ask what is this "mumbo jumbo", and whether he is "serious". He points out to you that if these aircraft are Russian or Chinese in origin, given there is no defence against them, they pose a major threat to national security and your refusal to take them seriously will not bode well for you in the annals of time if they do turn out to be a threat.
You agree to funding a small program to research further.
Then an Army General walks in. He wants $2m for a program to research "remote viewing" and "psychokinesis". You sit in awe as he explains: multiple independent laboratories have been able to conduct experiments that show Extra-Sensory Perception, Remote Viewing and Psychokinesis may be real despite not being explained by any current physical model. There is intelligence to suggest that Chinese and Russian militaries are investing in these techniques and the US military is not able to defend against them if they're real and exploited by adversaries, or for the USA to exploit them either, because they have no understanding of them.
You hand wave it away as "mumbo jumbo" and state this is not the work of "serious people". You demand a physical model to explain it before you invest.
You are reminded that there is no single physical model that explains the entirety of how an aircraft wing works, or how anaesthetics work, and that the only way such models are created is through scientific investigation. If after spending the $2m they're able to show such claims are baseless, that is a null result that has value in that it shows the Russians and Chinese are also not a threat to US National Security.
You are reminded that such techniques may pose a major threat to national security and your refusal to take them seriously will not bode well for you in the annals of time if they do turn out to be a threat.
You agree to funding a small program to research further.
And on it goes. It's Occam's razor - if you commit to the scientific method, you have to commit to it. If you are concerned there is a science and technology that others have and you don't, you need to figure out if there is value in you being able to obtain that science or technology, even if it sounds like "mumbo jumbo" today.
These weren't idiots, they weren't corrupt, they were asking for tiny slithers of money to figure out if Western Civilisation was about to collapse into the hands of a few people who asked more questions.
Putting legitimate resources into a phony cause could be an effective way of leading an enemy astray, if you know they are intercepting or replicating the same research you're doing (or if you happen to " leak " details to them).
I have seen, after writing through Tor to a known intelligence agency, a ministry of a cabinet through my inner eye, or whatever you may call it.
Black and white video so to speak. I was even threatened by a twice loaded gun so I could go away to my own businesses in that affair.
I can talk without being in the same room with a lot of cni agents, and interestingly, this is not a known fact of the intelligence community outside it.
I can even receive and transmit figures using my mind alone. Tested with a CIA agent. Greets to the spy museum series.
I would predict in the past, a year ago or so, a future event seen as it was filmed. Also diverted pathways in the past: if I could have went into the foreign legion I could be dead at the time and my mother could had defenestrated herself after being noticed by two officers: movie style too.
Sometimes I have listened to people thoughts, small phrases without them noticing.
Disclaimer: I am not on any agency payroll at this time.