Remote viewing

When remote viewing (English Remote Viewing or Remote Perception ) is a hypothetical type of perception called, with the help of events or information about a place or a scene ( "target" or "target" ) should be accessible through extrasensory perception, of which the perceiver ( percipient ) is separated by spatial distance or temporal distances. Systematic research on remote viewing, which are counted for the field of parapsychology, began in the 1970s, mainly in the form of projects that have been initiated and funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA. Many of the results obtained here were not published until 1995.

Technology and studies

The technique of remote viewing based on the fact that the viewer ( seer ) attempts by extra-sensory technology to perceive objects or events that he can not grasp with his usual five senses. The target to be detected ( target) may be present as an image, for example, in space and / or time are removed or hidden in a sealed envelope. At the beginning a remote viewing session (session ), the viewer does not know what he can "see" or to perceive (blind session). Thus, the result of a session is not affected by the imagination and the memory contents of the Viewer.

Studies of the PEAR Institute ( Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab), in collaboration of the IGPP (Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health ) found that so-called psi- effects are not replicated as required or practical.

History

There have been repeated reports about people who supposedly specified events in the distance right. Here, like the percipient have been personally involved (about Emanuel Swedenborg ) or have received by ties of kinship telepathically from the death of a relative knowledge ( the so-called "Crisis apparitions " which can manifest itself through physical symptoms or hallucinations). First Free -response experiments took AW Thaw (1892 ), Upton Sinclair (1930, together with his wife, who concentrated into a dressing room to objects, to which Sinclair chronicled his impressions ) and René Warcollier (1938).

Systematically, the remote viewing was, however, not been evaluated by the Americans. 1970 launched the Stanford Research Institute (SRI ) in Menlo Park ( California ), which was attached at Stanford University, experiments with a team supposedly gifted media. Established the project had the American physicist Harold Puthoff, which his colleague Russell Targ joined. From the experiments, the so-called Coordinate Remote Viewing, called together with the consequential variations in the Germans generally call as " remote viewing " was born.

From 1973 to 1988, intensive experiments. Then took over (1990 ) Science Applications International Corporation ( SAIC) in Palo Alto ( California ) program. Their leader was Edwin May

Including the Army, Navy, NASA and the CIA - - Since 1970, the remote viewing project federally was financially supported because they determine the early seventies a " psi gap" ( Psychic gap) towards the Soviet Union believed. Consisting of six media group worked isolated on military projects. She tried, for example, nuclear missiles, to discover secret military site and underground stations. End of the seventies jumped the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA ) for the CIA and gave the project the code name Stargate. In 1989 the program was first declared to be secret, until one in 1995 deprived him of the support. In 24 years, the government had supported the activities of the small group with a total of $ 20 million. The official reason for the setting of Stargate was that the work of the Group have not achieved much.

Also at Princeton University remote viewing experiments were run, with the variety " precognitive ". Robert Jahn led the PEAR ( Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) and put 1987 in the U.S. with the book " Margins of Reality " a theoretically well-founded report. Another basis were the Ganzfeld experiments of Charles Honorton from Edinburgh. In these experiments, sensory screened subjects should aufskizzieren in the lab, what they had seen of what looked Agents in an adjoining room to video clips or images. This was one of the most successful experimental batches of parapsychology in the past decades.

Even the Freiburg " Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health " presented to a trial in which the agent ( Elmar Gruber ) was staying in Rome and the Perzipientin ( Marilyn Schlitz ) in Minnesota wrote down their impressions. The report on the successful trials was published in December 1980.

In order for a remote viewing experiment not only remains a parlor game, strict criteria must be met. There must be no connection between percipient and agent; the target ( destination) must randomly before the experiment, are best selected by a computer; the sketches and descriptions of the percipient must according to a specified key by a judge (or rather several judges ), who knows neither its aim nor the parties involved, are evaluated. In the Freiburg test compliance with a number between 1 (very low) and 10 was ( perfect or a "hit " ) specified. The Princeton attempts to work with a much more detailed experimental arrangement.

In a normal test, the target is selected randomly, the agent travels there, looking 10 to 15 minutes there to and can concentrate on the contours of the place or think of the percipient, of kilometers away sitting in a shielded room and at the same time speaks into a microphone, which he perceives. Also, he makes sketches. This plays to a fixed time, because the percipient may possibly thousands of miles away are.

Reception in the media

In the comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats from 2009 is an attempt at experimental Psi special unit of the U.S. Army to investigate remote viewing and deploy shown.