• NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!

    Subscribe to The Paracast Newsletter!

Remote Viewing


This just in from Jim Underdown:

I have all 4 envelopes on the couch in my office under a Skeptical Inquirer magazine

1 contains a number
1 contains a word
1 contains an image
1 contains a card (not necessarily a playing card.)

Best regards,

James Underdown
Executive Director, Center for Inquiry-Los Angeles
Chair, Independent Investigations Group
(323) 666-9797 ext 101
CFI Los Angeles
 
I may have a answer on why the remote viewing military unit was disbanded after the freedom of information released. This is a common practice in the world of Special Operations most Black Operations projects or units after being found out disband their unit and reorganize under a new name so in Government records and in budgeting the unit didnt exist anymore.

It was closed because it was given to the CIA, which had just had a significant budget and personnel cut. The project was funded with personnel slots for another year. They took it and shut it down as fast as possible and took the budget and slots for their people.

The CIA was given the project but they didn't want it; they took it because of the pre-approved funding attached.

They were offered the project because they had actually tried to get it repeatedly for years and were the biggest repeat customer in the program.

The reason they didn't want it anymore was because a massive change happened in the program in the mid 1980s. Tasking increased exponentially from late 1970s every month until then, which one is forced to assume is based on results since those taskings had to be paid for (funding was from a huge variety of military, intelligence, and corporations). The effects and results after the mid-80s were so bad that as author Jim Schnabel reported in his book, by the late 80s the viewers then in the unit didn't have hardly any work and were busy with indian beading, computer programming, one (morehouse) had a housecleaning business on the side.

The reason they had nothing to do was because once the results were seen, a good deal of the intell viewing shifted to the viewers who were in the science lab. Which happened to include the guy who'd been doing it when the big change happened; he left the unit and went to the lab.

So, in short, the program closed for the unit's incompetence. The science lab was not initially closed; that did not happen until a short time later and for other (political and disinformation) reasons.

This should not be seen as any statement on remote viewing as a subject; had it not had something worth showing, it wouldn't have gotten an entire unit and years of constantly growing paid tasking in the first place. It is a statement on bad management, and on what happens when you surgically remove the 'science protocol' from the 'psychic art' -- remote viewing is a combination of the two.

Of course this does result in the situation where the people in the DIA unit are in the situation of having appeared to contributed to the demise of their project. The realization that these people are in public as the experts and authorities on the topic makes you go "Hmmmn."

The CIA or DIA could have stopped their communicating about a lot of this with a single signature. Curiously that never happened, and despite several high-level reportings of Ed Dames for stuff that probably should have put him in Leavenworth, he was never investigated; he and Morehouse were in a "strategic deception" unit when they left the military; Ed was promoted to Major and released.

He went into the world very very loudly talking about something he called 'remote viewing' which has a bare resemblance to it -- a lot of resemblance with an experimental psychic method (an experiment which was canceled for lack of evidence of its value, circa 1986), but zero resemblance to the protocol which is the single thing that took psi out of the mystical wishful woo-woo and often fraudulent cultural muck it's been relegated to since the dawn of time, and cleaned it off and made it able to be studied and applied cleanly. Pretty much everything he (and to a lesser degree but similar manner, his coworkers of that era) have advertised since 1995 has turned out to be more a matter of disinformation than anything.

Remote Viewing is free-response psychic functioning as performed within a legitimate RV science protocol. Art+Science. One without the other is not RV. Psychic methods (controlling the RV process for the psychic, to the degree possible) are optional, variable and arbitrary. Dames and his coworkers have sold the world on the idea that only their method (I mean the experiment canceled--see above) "is" RV; this strips out science entirely so any amount of bogus stuff can promptly join it, and this ensures that if RV is defined by that method then those "former intelligence people" are forever the only true authorities/experts. Of course, Ed also managed to staple RV instantly and directly to 50 years of very effective disinformation in UFOlogy, and to create a list of favored 'trainees' who went into the public eye and did at least as much damage as he has (Dr. Courtney Brown and Aaron Donahue primarily).

I might add that real viewers may choose to use the method referred to above; Daz uses it and does well with it, as do others. Some people use the Silva method. For the record, the primary remote viewing methodology demonstrated in science would be Ganzfeld. That is an altered state, masked eye, red light, white noise, verbal communication approach. With less officially hokey setup, anybody can try this at home. Learn something about target selection and tasking and teach someone near you.

RC
 
1 contains a number
1 contains a word
1 contains an image
1 contains a card (not necessarily a playing card.)
http://www.cfiwest.org

Unless that image is an object/person/location and the target is the thing-in-focus and not the image itself, that is about the worst combination of targets possible. Actually if I were a skeptic and I wanted to deliberately aim for what RV did worst and carefully avoid what it did best, that's about exactly what I would choose. You must have some experience with this.

RC
 
A civilian may have the freedom of information rights to the stargate program but not to whatever name and organization they may have changed into and what they have become.

This part is important for the past as well. There was never a stargate program, you do realize that, right.

There were many, many 'projects' and they overlapped and the dates on at least some are pretty 'creative'. When the CIA made the overall program public, a few of the projects had already been made public, and by the time the CIA decided to clean out the file drawers (literally) and very carefully release about 5% of the documentation from the project -- perhaps I'm cynical but I distrust their reasoning on every inclusion -- a few more projects had been mentioned publicly.

They gathered the projects which were already known about and they put them under the umbrella name "The STAR GATE Program." That was the name of the last unit project in '95 when it closed. In doing this they accomplished three things: They ensured that anybody searching for information via FOIA would only find "the projects we chose to lump under the name TSP"; they ensured that anybody searching for psychic stuff during that era could simply be 'automatically categorized as looking for the stargate program'; and, they then real carefully vetted what they wanted to be released for that and did it all at once, to save the FOIA altogether and ensure any future requests could merely point to that. Better still, since they had it all in one huge collection, they could make people pay for it, rather than having to deal with sending out pieces at a time on request.

RC
 
Hi there.

The Center For Inquiry-Los Angeles is located at 4773 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, California 90027. James Underdown's office is on the second floor. There are several items in the office with Jim's name on them so the person should be able to determine which office is Jim's. In the office there is a black bag with two envelopes in it. One envelope contains a number. The other envelope contains a word. All the remote viewer needs to do is tell us what is written inside each of the envelopes. The remote viewer should email their results to the IIG at [email protected] and, in this case, they should probably cc Gene and David at whatever email they say should be used.

-Derek

If my understanding of the process is correct, I think you've already given him too much information. And static targets are suppopsedly more difficult. My thinking was more along the lines of sharing target information between some number of forum members, then tell Daz to let 'er rip. All members of the group then rate the performance 0 to 100%. Repeat the test to refine the scores.

Or something along those lines anyway. Maybe it's unfeasible. There is a certain amount of trust involved with exchanging target information over email.

Edit: I wrote this all before reading the rest of the replies. Now I'm morer redundanter.
 
Maybe y'all better start over. It's obvious what the pattern will be now. If the targets are missed it will be because they were 'inappropriate' and biased in favor of failure, therefore not a true test of the system. Either you really are programming this for failure, or you are giving a massive excuse for it.
 
I see your point, but I think you're missing the main one: The issue is the definition of remote viewing and what people claim to be able to do.

You do not go to people with cameras and demand that their camera perform by providing GPS coordinates. If you did, you would either be ignorant of what the tool was expected to do, or you would be attempting to judge the tool by something nobody ever claimed for it in the first place, which would make no sense at all, unless you just wanted to mislead onlookers about what's really going on.

(I use 'you' in the general sense here, not you personally of course.)

If you told someone you played piano and were a musician, and they "set up a test" and gave you a 12-string pedal-steel guitar in eFlat and told you to prove yourself on it, would that be fair? You might say, "Well yes but this is NOT what I said I could do," and they'd say, "Aha, making excuses again eh!"

Did the person viewing say they felt they could describe numbers/letters/papers, which are quite famously -- in case you're not aware -- the very least likely things to succeed such as in a science trial of remote viewing? No, they did not. So ask yourself, why would a "test of them" even AFTER this was made clear, immediately pull up those famous examples?

Someone tasking like that, in this case, clearly knows what remote viewing does least, and is deliberately tasking to it. This makes them untrustworthy from the outset--now, no matter what the target was, I would not trust them not to change it or do something else devious to try and work against the project. It's an issue of "good faith"; it's obvious they haven't got it.

What I would like to see is a remote viewing trial. If you want to be halfway legitimate, use the criteria that a proper science lab experienced with remote viewing would use -- that would be a singular, specific location, with a clear photo feedback.

Otherwise, what someone might be looking for 'a way out of' is not RV, but an obvious "set up" that isn't geared to test what RV is expected to do anyway.

RC
 
Unless that image is an object/person/location and the target is the thing-in-focus and not the image itself, that is about the worst combination of targets possible. Actually if I were a skeptic and I wanted to deliberately aim for what RV did worst and carefully avoid what it did best, that's about exactly what I would choose. You must have some experience with this.

RC

What do you suggest then?

How can the image not be an object, or location? Well, if it's art, I can see your point.

I've ran tests with some of what you say nay too. I've seen moderate success with it.
 
I think that there are some people who have some special ability. But once i hear the word remote viewing i instantly think you crappy UFO and space brothers channelers, and my internal alarms go off.

There you go. Ed Dames and Courtney Brown successfully took the single most scientifically credible approach to psi in the history of man, and in a few episodes of late-night radio, utterly obliterated the public value of decades of science they had no part of.

People DO associate the term with that now. Imagine for a moment you're a viewer working to help find a lost girl in a winter forest. Imagine the warden won't let you in or take you seriously no matter what your credentials or someone else's assurance you're legit, because they heard about Remote Viewing and thought exactly that about RV -- the stuff famous for late night radio. By the time they let you take a small team to get her, because every other possible approach failed, she's dying. You get to feel that (aren't you glad you're psychic). And you arrive just in time to pick up her warm little corpse, since she died of exposure 10 minutes before your team reached her. Imagine how you'd feel about people deliberately making the 'remote viewing' term associate with lunatics and morons. {Tip: this is a true story. Not mine.}

Dames and his coworkers and his spawn have been tremendously successful. I hope they're proud. (I also kinda hope they rot in hell for that, but that's just my evil-channeled-twin.)

RC
 
What do you suggest then?

I stated what I suggested twice above. In the science lab, any image would merely be 'feedback'; the actual target is 'the focus of the photo at the time it was taken'; the photo is probably best some kind of location, at normal human scale (eg not star-systems or molecules).

I've ran tests with some of what you say nay too. I've seen moderate success with it.

In case I wasn't clear, I am not suggesting "it is impossible to be psychic except about locations." On the contrary, anybody who does psi regularly occasionally sees a little of everything in there -- there is nothing I can think of that cannot be psychically accessed "in theory and on occasion" -- but it's a matter of probabilities and what both the art and the viewer are good at. Anybody can put a basketball through a hoop, and pros can do it all the time. But if I'm going to "test someone's ability to free-throw," I do it from the free-throw line -- not from a full court away. Because (a) they didn't claim they could do that, so why test it, and (b) the chances of success are so much lower as to make it not worth demanding; the player wouldn't even claim they were good at that. On the other hand, people certainly CAN throw the ball one-handed from the other end of the court and make it in with only 2 seconds on the clock when they let go -- saw it happen once, screamed myself hoarse. :) A person could in theory even practice toward that. Some people would probably be more likely to succeed at it sometimes than others. But on the whole, MOST basketball players do not do freethrows from 3x the 'freethrow line distance'. So, that is not how I would set up a trial to test that particular claim.

Psi can do anything... except be very consistent. There are probably good reasons for this science will figure out later. The Local Sidereal Time studies for example show a 400% increase in effect-size at 13:30 LST and a "deadzone" of chance-stats at 18:00 LST. Why? Who the heck knows? It's just embarrassing for them because they don't want to have ANY association with 'the stars' and yet the stats don't lie, especially when taken on thousands of already-passed trials from the previous decade. Something ELSE is probably related to both of course; but who knows what. There are definite limits to what can be claimed with remote viewing. It's not impossible to get a street name and to get walking directions to find someone lost that literally say "go X feet this way, turn and go up the stairs, go down to the fourth door on the left..." -- McMoneagle's done it in Japan with their FBI and Nippon TV -- but I don't know any viewer including him who would ever SAY "oh yea, I can get street names and detailed walking directions". It's not impossible; it's just really improbable.

RC
 
Hello,

I would like to add that I know both Daz and Red Cairo (over the internet), have seen many of Daz's fine sessions, and believe they are two of the most knowledgeable and straight talking people in the field of RV you can find. (Simply a brief testimonial from a person new to the forum.) Naturally, I don't agree with every one of their opinions, but we are on the same page.

I hope that in addition to any test that is devised, people take the time to read the literature from the many links and references that have been given to the existing scientific and other work. That is, if one wants to have an informed opinion about it, as opposed to a few of the dismissive comments posted here.

In terms of testing remote viewing, I fully agree with their comments. Numbers and words are exceedingly difficult. Correct information has been obtained about them in some instances, but they are not the best test of remote viewing. People, place, events, etc. are better targets/objectives. And the viewer should know nothing about the objective selected ahead of time by the "tasker". (RV data does not come from the conscious mind.)

In my experience (about 9 years) remote viewing is definitely real, you can obtain useful data with it, it is by no means perfect, it is best used in conjunction with other modalities. And it is a puzzle - no one knows how it works (in terms of physics, biochem, the brain/mind, etc.).

KRG
 
There you go. Ed Dames and Courtney Brown successfully took the single most scientifically credible approach to psi in the history of man, and in a few episodes of late-night radio, utterly obliterated the public value of decades of science they had no part of.

People DO associate the term with that now. Imagine for a moment you're a viewer working to help find a lost girl in a winter forest. Imagine the warden won't let you in or take you seriously no matter what your credentials or someone else's assurance you're legit, because they heard about Remote Viewing and thought exactly that about RV -- the stuff famous for late night radio. By the time they let you take a small team to get her, because every other possible approach failed, she's dying. You get to feel that (aren't you glad you're psychic). And you arrive just in time to pick up her warm little corpse, since she died of exposure 10 minutes before your team reached her. Imagine how you'd feel about people deliberately making the 'remote viewing' term associate with lunatics and morons. {Tip: this is a true story. Not mine.}

Dames and his coworkers and his spawn have been tremendously successful. I hope they're proud. (I also kinda hope they rot in hell for that, but that's just my evil-channeled-twin.)

RC

There a case in which a remote viewer helped police?
 
Hello,

I would like to add that I know both Daz and Red Cairo (over the internet), have seen many of Daz's fine sessions, and believe they are two of the most knowledgeable and straight talking people in the field of RV you can find. (Simply a brief testimonial from a person new to the forum.) Naturally, I don't agree with every one of their opinions, but we are on the same page.

I hope that in addition to any test that is devised, people take the time to read the literature from the many links and references that have been given to the existing scientific and other work. That is, if one wants to have an informed opinion about it, as opposed to a few of the dismissive comments posted here.

In terms of testing remote viewing, I fully agree with their comments. Numbers and words are exceedingly difficult. Correct information has been obtained about them in some instances, but they are not the best test of remote viewing. People, place, events, etc. are better targets/objectives. And the viewer should know nothing about the objective selected ahead of time by the "tasker". (RV data does not come from the conscious mind.)

In my experience (about 9 years) remote viewing is definitely real, you can obtain useful data with it, it is by no means perfect, it is best used in conjunction with other modalities. And it is a puzzle - no one knows how it works (in terms of physics, biochem, the brain/mind, etc.).

KRG


You seem to think they're going to fail..
 
Who said anything about dropping the test(s)? Continue the tests, but read the literature. The latter is what so many skeptics apparently fail to do.

KRG
 
Who said anything about dropping the test(s)? Continue the tests, but read the literature. The latter is what so many skeptics apparently fail to do.

KRG


I've read the literature.

I edited my post she is responding to, before I knew she/he replied. I said, something like, "Ok, she/he says it's real, lets drop the test". My position was why the diatribe? To over rule the test results?

The test I am conducting has the approval of the remote viewer. Talk with him if you have issues, or step up and do him one better.

At least 2 remote viewers talk about how images are bad.... funny, he recommended it. Why should I think you people who aren't doing tests are more correct than he, who is willing to do one?

In order to back up what you say, it's going to take more than typing up stuff in a forum.

David, Tommy, Myself and Derek, and perhaps Skunkape and one other are willing to do tests with people. Take your pick, lets work something out and demonstrate.
 
You seem to think they're going to fail..

Who said anything about the test(s) going to fail? Let's see how they go. As someone, said, when the results are in everyone can make up their own minds as to how accurate the viewing was. Daz is a fine viewer and is usually on target; but not always, as he posts on his own web site. I think I know who Gulliver is and he is very often "on" as well. So we'll see.

KRG
 
Great!
two targets that just happen to be the only documented things that are the hardest to (and in some circles of Rv theory) are impossible to remote view successfully, words and numbers, both of which has no physical presence in reality :) and are constructs of human language with no actual form.

Sorry But these are NOT good remote viewing targets and not a good experiment to use.

It's probably not coincidental that letters and numbers are also hard to see in dreams. I've had a lot of trouble trying to dial a phone in dreams, for instance.
 
I've read the literature.

Great!

I edited my post she is responding to, before I knew she/he replied. I said, something like, "Ok, she/he says it's real, lets drop the test". My position was why the diatribe? To over rule the test results?

If you call that a diatribe, we are going to have difficulty agreeing on anything. (BTW, I am a male.)

The test I am conducting has the approval of the remote viewer.

Sounds good to me.

Talk with him if you have issues, or step up and do him one better.

I was adding another point of view; from my point of view it's in line with that of Daz, Red Cairo and others. I may volunteer later or be part of a test. Let's see how the two shape up. (Since there are about 3 threads on this, hard to keep track of everything stemming from the interview.)

At least 2 remote viewers talk about how images are bad.... funny, he recommended it.

People here are saying that words and numbers are difficult to view. An image (photo) of a person, place, thing or event is fine. There is broad agreement about that among remote viewers.

Why should I think you people who aren't doing tests are more correct than he, who is willing to do one?

Where do you get this idea?

In order to back up what you say, it's going to take more than typing up stuff in a forum.

See the above. Let the tests proceed.

David, Tommy, Myself and Derek, and perhaps Skunkape and one other are willing to do tests with people. Take your pick, lets work something out and demonstrate.

Daz and Gulliver are already working things out for testing. That's two tests pending.

But again, why so much emphasis on the tests and so little discussion of the scientific and other literature that demonstrates the reality of RV? That RV works has been demonstrated, over and over again. E.g. see the videos or books or web site of Stephan Schwartz or Russell Targ, the sessions on Daz's web site from his own work, and sessions from SRI and the Ft. Meade days. For anyone on the forum who hasn't seen some actual RV sessions, I do recommend taking a look at some. It will give an idea of the feeling of an RV session and what is doable. I also highly recommend the videos of Joe McMoneagle on youtube as well.

KRG
 
Some informative posts in this thread.

Where public testing is concerned there seem to be two main issues:

1. The RVer wants to be assured that test images have characteristics that lend themselves to successful viewing.

2. The observers want to be assured that there is no collusion or suggestion behind the scenes, such as the test administrator consciously or unconsciously informing the RV'ers of the targets.

I do think that having some person, whether it be Biedny or Underdown picking target images is unacceptable. Both may be entirely honest but why even bring trust into the equation when it can be eliminated entirely?

You could devise some scheme that involved random number generators selecting from a large pool of pre-approved digital images that are cryptographically signed, hashed and timestamped, with prior public posting of the hash but I'm guessing nobody here is going to go to all that trouble without getting paid.

So, here's my scheme:

Have a test that lasts for seven days. The target for each day will be the main cover photo of the print edition of The New York Times, seven days in the future. If the test begins on Monday, the target will be the cover photo for the following Monday. The New York Times posts an image of each cover every day.

Here are links to the past seven days of covers:
4/29 4/28 4/27 4/26 4/25 4/24 4/23

This provides a pool of distinctive, visually interesting(usually) human perspective(usually) images and as the editors of The Times usually have no idea themselves as to which image they will run until the last minute it should effectively eliminate any mistrust between involved parties and provide observers with adequate evidence that there was no collusion or manipulation behind the scenes. Most, if not all, of these images won't even exist at the time of the test as The Times will be pulling from the lastest staff and press pool photos of unknown future events.

This mechanism also provides the RV'ers with multiple opportunities to allow for off-days/sick days, etc. rather than a pass/fail scenario and using multiple days allows for some images being confusing or inappropriate for RVing. The presence of inappropriate images should actually enhance the test if the RVers all get poor results on the same day. Each submitted worksheet/sketch must be posted to this board on the day of the test, a full seven days before the target image is printed. Late submissions will be discarded.

Of course, judging is where the arguments will start but that is just gonna be the nature of the thing. Either YOU think they are reasonably accurate or you don't. This scheme isn't perfect but it seems to me to be as close as you are going to get to something outside of a laboratory environment that satisfies the needs of all parties in a tamper-proof manner and is easily conducted over the net.

What do you think?
 
Back
Top