world's biggest remote viewing experiment

reply to RedCairo

continued, post#4 in series

Initially the 'remote viewing' in that branch of science study had been the general RV term. When the dilemma of 'finding an address' for a target without giving away any info to the psychic about it was addressed using geographical coordinates, that is a 'tasking protocol' and that came to be called 'coordinate remote viewing'. (Note to UFOlogists: Jacques Vallee actually published a paper on that addressing dilemma in the 70s, I think it was in something like Journal of Scientific Exploration.) Later, it was acknowledged that the whole point of anybody having a method -- and every psychic develops their own method, of course, which usually has pieces of things they've learned from others, and some they've developed themselves -- was to "control" the process. So it then was called "controlled remote viewing." Technically this term is fair to use for any remote viewing in which the viewer is making an effort to control the process in some fashion. This was acronym'd "CRV" which is what Buchanan and Smith and Morehouse officially sell.

Everything that "wasn't CRV" -- the "altered state" and "no particular external method" formats used by the viewers in the first unit and the science lab -- they called "extended RV" -- mostly because it often took longer. That was kind of a pointless acronym (ERV) because it literally had no clear definition, it was many things and mostly stuff-they-didn't-do. Later on, since the people in the second unit had been totally indoctrinated into RV with the concept of "formal method", they kind of redid what they called ERV and imposed various processes and rules upon it. So the definition of ERV will depend on who's using it and when they learned something about it. Currently, Morehouse teaches ERV as well. (It's possible, since it's a $-source, that the other trainers might now be offering it also, can't remember.)

Ed Dames had a student who became a girlfriend during training, with PR experience; she came from a family of money and was married to actor Brad Dourif, later known for his good work in scifi and 'Lord of the Rings' (well, not married anymore once she and Dames became an item). At her (wise) encouragement he re-branded CRV into "TRV" (technical remote viewing), which since he apparently had his own framework for interpreting a couple areas of it was fine (probably better it had a separate acronym), and that was trademarked and their company PSI-TECH sold training services and other things under that acronym.

As mentioned there are other people who claim "government lineage but not from that project" (whether you believe them is up to you) and have their own methods. These include Gerald O'Donnell and Glenn Wheaton. There are also people trained by some of this group, or who independently decided they were remote viewing experts, who have written books and gone in media about it. These include Aaron Donahue and Tim Rifat.

So if you want to remote view, you have a few choices:

1. Buy, rent, borrow, steal a book with general simple info and teach yourself (such as MIND TREK, simple, or REMOTE VIEWING SECRETS, a little more complex).

2. Buy a web-course or CD/DVDs with specific info for a given method (Morehouse currently has a CRV training course book/discs, and Dames has DVDs as well).

3. Buy in-person training in some kind of psychic method. This could be the things most popular associated with the term 'remote viewing' such as CRV, ERV, TRV, SRV (Dr. Courtney Brown's variant on TRV), etc. etc.

4. Attend a seminar by someone who knows something about RV who gives you as part of that "tips/pointers/advice." This is probably not as good as any of the first three, but it's probably fun and a good overview-intro. People like Stephan Schwartz (www.stephanaschwartz.com...) and Russell Targ (www.espresearch.com...) often gives these kind of seminars.

to be continued

reply to RedCairo

continued, post #5 in a series

(still talking about how you can learn about RV yourself)

5. Read some science online about it. I recommend things like:

A - Cognitive Sciences Laboratory website has white papers, examples, and a library www.lfr.org...

B - Dr. Charles T. Tart was a consultant during the official RV research and has worked on psi/parapsychology since the 60s. He has a 'virtual library' online with some interesting white papers, at www.paradigm-sys.com...

C - Probably the best introduction to this for 'serious laymen' is a meta-analysis review by statistician Dr. Jessica Utts in 1991, published in the Journal Statistical Science. It's a series of papers (hers, responses which are mostly, "Gah! Nothing psychic can be real! What BS!" LOL, and her rebuttal) on her website, here's a direct link to the menu for those:
anson.ucdavis.edu...

D - I have an ancient post I wrote for TinWiki on remote viewing research if you're interested in the overview, here:
redcairo.blogspot.com...


6. - If you're interested in discussion archives with half a dozen of the people from the former government program, you can see the archives of an email group called VIEWER I ran 1997-8:
www.firedocs.com...
there's an index Skye Turell made for it eons ago here:
www.firedocs.com...
There are radio/print transcripts dating back to 1993 that you can find (including several art bell and jeff rense shows, etc.) on my old Firedocs RV collection website, here:
www.firedocs.com...
There's a few more specific interviews with viewer Joe McMoneagle here:
www.firedocs.com...

If you have a sense of humor about RV: www.firedocs.com...

7. If you want to talk with others, or try it yourself...

There's a big RV project that is a 'free public' project that invites everybody no matter what their preferred 'psychic method' for RV, Ten Thousand Roads (aka TKR). They have a big discussion forum here:
www.dojopsi.info...

There's some hands-on viewing where you can practice either alone privately, alone but make it public, or once a week with others, at TKR at the Dojo Psi, here:
www.dojopsi.com...


Good thing I type at insane speeds... I'm stopping now. Hope this has been helpful.

PJ
palyne.com
redcairo.com



[edit on 28-1-2009 by RedCairo]

Good history lesson there,written well too

On a side note there is also a dark side to remote viewing that isnt mentioned a lot.The army were looking into it as a means of assasination if they could get a viewer with strong enough powers.I heard that they manged to kill a lab rat by getting the ERV'r to stop its heart.This was some time ago and I havnt heard of any human targets,but even if it was possible I dont think anyone is going to taint their soul by doing that wicked deed to another human.

RV'ng can also be shielded by electromangentic freq's,As a few viewers have run into stuff like this on sensative targets(alien themed)and found they couldnt pass through

Saddam Hussein stunned the world during the gulf war saying that the americans were using psychic spies on him!I remember seeing this in the papers at the time and a lot of my friends thought he was mad to say that,of course I knew he was not!

He was rumered to have a team of psychics around him that blocked out any unwanted guests snooping on him.
www.paraview.com...

I took a look at the projectrv.com website the original poster referenced.

The graphic design is very nice!

The domain is registered anonymously and updated today. I'm always uncomfortable with that. In a world of more people determined to harm RV than help it, I suppose a little paranoia is in order.

Some comments about the experiment.

First -- all interactive things that are blind to the viewer are good. I encourage that wherever I find it. The most important element of learning RV is just hands-on doing it.

Second -- there are some 'quibbling details' about the setup though.

1. It is not actually what is traditionally defined as remote viewing. Although remote viewing targets can technically be anything (even someone's thoughts), the traditional science approach, which should be used for anything claiming to want to prove whether it works or not -- and this has defined RV in general in several ways the last 38 years -- is that the target is a LOCATION. Not an object. Object-targets is what was commonly worked on through the 60s; choosing "location" as the target-type in 1971 with free-response psi is where remote viewing was 'born' as a formal approach.

This difference is relevent. There is some evidence that the 'inherent energy within' a target may actually relate to how well it is perceived psychically in a couple of different ways (both in terms of human attention and in terms of physical entropy. So for example, the olympics fireworks opening is likely to come through better for more people, than a plastic mass manufactured figurine).

Further, the one thing critical to remote viewing is a complete double blind with no frontloading. Now, knowing the target is "a location on earth" is about as minimal on frontloading as you can get, besides being given just a number; because the location could be any size, any place, on/under/above ground, of any imaginable nature. Generally location targets are specific to location (not people or events).

However the targets given for this project are "objects placed on a piece of white paper." That actually creates quite a large frontloading already. We know it's an object, as 'object' we know it's not a life form (or are frontloaded with that assumption), we know it's probably not bigger than a foot in at least two dimensions.

Issues here:

A - the first is with viewing itself. The more information the viewer has, the more that interferes with the viewing process. Analytical information causes a lot of distortion (this is why a 'moderate target pool bandwidth' is used in science; because too small a bandwidth [like this experiment] creates too much memory or assumption, and too large a bandwidth [like letting the target be anything in the universe, even fiction/thought/event/quantum/cosmic/etc.] creates too much imagination. Both imagination and logic are the tools the mind uses for this process but anything that weights the process too heavily in either direction can have negative consequences on the session results. See the papers at CSL (linked to in previous post) on this.

B - the second is with skeptics at large. Not only are viewers likely to be less good at a small object than a whole location (see comments above about the innate quality/energy within a target, plus the comments immediately above about analytical issues), but pretty much any skeptic after the fact is likely to say, "they knew it was an object of not bigger than X size, they could have guessed."

C - viewing is 'descriptive, not labeling'. Most people with a target of an object are going to expect someone to name the object at least to some degree, rather than describe it which is more typical to RV.

Traditional psychics might do better at this kind of trial than traditional viewers.

a few other comments, but I'm out of room...

(continued)

The site says it wants to demonstrate whether or not RV ability exists (or something of that nature). This is not actually done, scientifically, by testing the mass public (particularly on frontloaded tasks, particularly on object-based targets). To get an effect size worth having and repeatable in the lab, they work hard to find the individuals who have the kind of skill to make that possible (plus the many other points of protocol that keep it clean and maximize clarity in results).

I predict that the only thing testing the mass public is likely to do is convince any onlooker that the vast majority of the mass public is not particularly psychic. This would not say anything with regards to the existence or potential of remote viewing. Research suggests that only about 1/2 of 1% have the ability to be what they call a world-class viewer (Swann or McMoneagle caliber). That might not be just talent, that might also mean the ability to obsess on it for eons to become so, of course (much like olympic athletes are not just talented, they're the ones crazy enough to focus that hard for that long to get to that point, too).

Any legitimate project that wanted to demonstrate something in a protocol that would have science credibility, even indirectly as a layman project, should be or have consulted with legit scientists with experience in legit remote viewing research.

For example, there is a huge website called gotpsi.org run by Dr. Dean Radin (author of THE CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE and another book I can't remember the name of right now sorry) -- that has "psi trials" in probably the millions by now.

There is also the question of evaluation. The website project doesn't spell out anything about the criteria for information or the criteria for judging. Now since I've been working with viewers, various methods, and online viewing in a doubleblind for many years now, I can tell you that there'll be plenty of people submitting sessions that might be 35 pages long and somewhere in there, describe every possible target in the known universe. There might be others with a single word. There might be others that have no word at all, just a general simplified shape-sketch. Or 30. There is no info as to how information should be presented, what or how it's going to be evaluated. There are many different ways to evaluate remote viewing, the most common being rank and fuzzy-set analysis. See the CSL website (lfr.org) for more information on those techniques.

Anyway, that's all just my thoughts off the top.


Probably a larger concern to the folks online is, why is it a big secret? No names anywhere, secret domain registration. It could be 'bad guys' looking for good viewers to cull; it could be just 'guys' someone wouldn't want to be involved with; it could be scoffers setting things up to help bring about the answer they want (there's been a few of those projects in the past); in any legit situation setting out to evidence/prove anything, transparence of protocol and up-front info is a given/expected.

Pretty website though.

PJ

Thanks - that input is huge...

On one small point - if I was hosting a website that was under scrutiny on a global basis...I wouldnt want my address in the public domain.

Also, given the anonymous nature of it...dont you think knowing nothing about the team helps.

Hopefully this is just the first stage of a series of experiments and they are doing something very simple first.

Originally posted by noangels
On a side note there is also a dark side to remote viewing that isnt mentioned a lot.The army were looking into it as a means of assasination if they could get a viewer with strong enough powers.

I agree there's been exploration all over the map including that, but I'd put that in the "projective psi" category; remote viewing is a "receptive psi" category, wouldn't you think. I do think there is some overlap where "rapport" is concerned. But in general, comparing the two, or calling anything projective RV, is like saying people used cameras to beam lasers at the enemy. One thing just collects information. No matter how similar it may look, something which projects-an-effect is a different ball o'wax.

I heard that they manged to kill a lab rat by getting the ERV'r to stop its heart.

There is only one group of people I trust even less than people claiming Phenomenal Psychic Powers™ -- and that would be anybody even associated with or referring to (let alone being) former military intelligence personnel. (Motto: "Truth: a flexibly suggestive and easily reviseable concept.") (Yes, I'm grateful they served the country and I realize this might be a professional deformation, but that group in general has destroyed both UFOlogy and Remote Viewing, and I have no sympathy at large as a result.) I would really question sources on nearly anything you hear in this subject. I've been researching it in various ways for 13 years now and the percentage of factual truth to everything-else is at nearly homeopathic dilutions. ;-)

I dont think anyone is going to taint their soul by doing that wicked deed to another human.

If it's doable, someone's probably doing it as I type.

RV'ng can also be shielded by electromangentic freq's,As a few viewers have run into stuff like this on sensative targets(alien themed)and found they couldnt pass through

If there is a genuine/repeatable effect in this respect, it would have to be some new phenomenon, or something different than what it seems. Electromagnetic interference and blockage has been researched at length and it cannot effect remote viewing (unless you're electrocuting the viewer -- that might work...). They've done shielding ranging from faraday cage, to other side of the planet, to waaaay down in a submarine. Distance and EM have no bearing on the results or success rate of remote viewing. I'm not saying that it's impossible there's some effect going on with what you call alien-themed targets; just that if so, it's probably something other than (and more interesting than!) EM.

Saddam Hussein stunned the world during the gulf war saying that the americans were using psychic spies on him!I remember seeing this in the papers at the time and a lot of my friends thought he was mad to say that,of course I knew he was not!

Hussein said that he believed the American government was using psychics to attempt to make him sick. I don't know if that's so (Buchanan says yes, but then, that was the second (not first) unit and others in that unit say the account's fiction). I remember there being this flap about how 'open source' info on RV is definitely read by the enemy, and on one occasion, Ed Dames went in a very public and promoted-transcript event (TREAT conference 1993 I believe) and announced Lyn Buchanan's name (Lyn was still a private operative at that time...) and then Saddam Hussein's name--related to his claims about psychics you mention in fact. The idea was that maybe Ed was trying to get Lyn killed off LOL. (Given his behavior toward him publicly in the media after that time, maybe that wasn't a stretch lol.)

He was rumered to have a team of psychics around him that blocked out any unwanted guests snooping on him.
www.paraview.com...

He wishes. Nobody can block a good viewer that wants to know. ;-)

PJ

Originally posted by annefran
On one small point - if I was hosting a website that was under scrutiny on a global basis...I wouldnt want my address in the public domain.

I agree with you there. But it's one thing not to put your home address in WHOIS. It's another to carefully not say anything about identity on a website or forums mentioning it.

Also, given the anonymous nature of it...dont you think knowing nothing about the team helps.

No, not really. Knowing the people would probably have told me less than knowing it's "an object on a piece of white paper" did.

Hopefully this is just the first stage of a series of experiments and they are doing something very simple first.

I'd like to see their protocol greatly expanded upon and made public though. I work with a lot of viewers, some quite talented, but all road-dog-weary after all these years and all the BS that has gone on over time. Most experienced viewers I know won't touch anything that is playing secret identity, and not making basic information about the trial protocol available, and not appearing to know some basics about remote viewing that have been well demonstrated by extensive and vastly better funded science decades ago (eg whether distance from target would matter to results).

I wish them well though -- maybe over time they'll evolve to something more transparent. Either way I'm sure it will be a lot of fun for everyone involved.

Best,
PJ

Almost a whole month to wait for the result! The suspense is killing me!


How can they calculate the baseline for such an experiement I mean...if there are only X amount of adjectives available to use for an object, wouldnt there be a calculatable % of the amount of people that would have randomly chosen the correct adjectives describing the object?

reply to post by RedCairo


As you wish - this whole thing has been inspired by ATS. It's myself and a few other friends that have met purely through ATS. That's what's exciting. I bought the domain, I did the website last saturday, realised that WHOIS hadn't blocked my home address so changed it (do I want newspapers calling me, asking me why I am such a nut?!!!!or do I want my address inadvertently mentioned on here...no...) . Another of our 'virtual' team wrote and recorded the music (it's fab) and we had a big, old team effort. Inspired by everything we have seen here.

We are really having fun and learning hugely. Thanks for the comment on the graphics. Hugely flattering...that's the MacBook Pro..!

We've loved 'meeting' each other and had a ball. So, anyone with any ideas that we are part of any conspiracy can put them to bed now.

We are a small group of random, 'virtual' friends (who met through ATS) were inspired by some small remote viewing experiments with each other. Our ability to tune into each other and make accurate guesses about each others' environments astounded us. We still don't know where each other lives, we don't know each others' full names, but we have decided that we will do something a bit crazy.

We are starting with small, really simple stuff first. To encourage loads of people to take part.

So, you've blown my cover...

Everything anyone has said is getting factored in. Either into this experiment...or the next one.

So - CONSIDER THIS A JOB ADVERT...WE ARE RECRUITING FOR A VIRTUAL TEAM MEMBER FROM THE STATES...

CANDIDATE MUST BE OPENMINDED, SCIENTIFIC, UNBIASED (SOMEONE WHO IS EITHER LOOKING TO DISPROVE OR PROVE NEED NOT APPLY).

COMMITMENT NEEDED. FRIENDLY ATTITUDE ESSENTIAL. NON-GENDER SPECIFIC!


I dont want any of my personal details getting out there. There are people who do search the WHOIS register

Thanks for the reply PJ,I can see know this subject realy well.If it wasnt for the fact that music is my passion in life I would still be CRV'ng.My training partner mentioned restarting again recently,and has bought a russian brave wave monitor out from an old hospital-great big thing!

Its been over 14 years,but I might put pen to paper again just to keep him happy

Wow that Dalai Llama quote in a signature above is great! That's a quote for the day for sure.

Sorry for the delay. Working for a living is really interfering with my social life.

The website looks great and I'm glad you guys are having fun. That is probably more important than almost anything else, since "intention, attention, and expectation" is a big part of results! It SHOULD be fun!

I think your hands-on make-it-fun approach to learning is perfect. If you keep doing it, you'll find that the doing it will teach you what you need to know. The hard way, of course -- but one of the great humors is that even when you get perfect advice, you don't really understand it fully enough to benefit until you learn on your own anyway. Best to let your own mind and hard feedback be your guide.

Since you're making the effort to do something, be sure you write up your process and results carefully and put them on the net somewhere. I'd love a link to it when you do, find me at dojopsi.com or any related projects.


On the whole (now and later) what matters and will help is staying within legit protocol. I'm referring to science and the origin of the RV term now. The reason it matters is because it exists to protect you from error, fraud and accident and many of the mistakes that can happen without it in place. Protocol really isn't about psi, but about controls; it's about making a safe-sane space to allow psi to do all it can with minimal interference or mucking-about from other factors. (As if it isn't mind boggling enough on its own, without things that can muddy the process or its understanding.)

RV is really two things combined: deliberate psychic functioning, and science controls. Like any science protocol it's evolved over the years. The basics are real simple:

1. It's gotta be on purpose. Spontaneous psi, dreams, etc. are psi but not 'remote viewing'. You need to be intending to collect psychic data about some defined target, past present or future. You don't need to know anything except that there is a target.

2. It's in a double-blind. This word means that both the viewer is 'blind' (doesn't know anything about the target) AND anybody else present with them is too. That means nobody in the room, or via webcam or phone, can know about the target. There are a ton of physiology senses that are basically invisible to our conscious mind but transfer lots of info. (These are often considered 'psychic' but they're not.) It's important for you and the session that the data really come from you, not other influences around you. Otherwise you just learn to cold-read others, rather than learning to view within yourself.

That's actually it, but as a note, you don't really know if something is 'remote viewing' or 'psychic' until you know it's accurate, and you don't know it's accurate until you have feedback on the intended target. You can view without feedback, but you can't say much about it except "how interesting" until you have some. :-)

Some people have psychic methods they use for the process. The most famous 'psychic method' is probably Silva Mind Control. In the RV-specific field it's probably CRV, which is one of those plain-english acronyms, "controlled remote viewing". This is normally representing a specific psychic method, but the words describe really any system used to attempt to control the psychic experience, even something you make up yourself. As far as legit RV and science goes, there is no method better or more legit than another; it's up to the viewer or the person running the trial. Whatever works for you. So "just do it".

Psychic functioning is by nature destabilizing, simply because it's messing with fundamental belief systems that your whole definition of reality rests upon. So be sure you have at least as many 'hard feedback' targets as anything else. That's what pounds on your belief systems, forcing change.

Best,
PJ

We have been totally inspired by ATS to do something crazy. We are a group of 'virtual' friends who dont know each other's surnames, or even the towns each other lives in.
We have decided to kick off a 'formal' remote viewing experiment...and it's this WEEKEND!
Check out our website Project RV

We would not exist without ATS...it's the spirit of it that's inspired us.
And we need another friend...we need someone in America.

Get involved...RV our objects at the weekend. WE WILL BE SETTING THEM UP AT 12PM (GMT) AND THEY WILL BE THERE FOR 48HRS.
The coordinates will be released at the same time on the website.
Any volunteering American cousin...U2U us!

The projectRV team

So excited about this!!!!!

Looking forward to it...it's been a crap month!

If/while your stuff is free, if you want a tiny bit of attention from viewers, you could post a message about it over at TKR RV&D. ( www.dojopsi.info/forum/ )