Remote Viewing: An indwelling Superpower

Remote Viewing took center stage when it was used operational by both East and West clandestine agencies during the Cold War. And how that happened for the West, and for Ingo in particular, is as follows...

Seeking to fit ESP into the scientific paradigm so fleeting in earlier experiments, Ingo, in the 1970s, showed that such abilities can be rigorously tested inside of well-designed and well-shielded repeatable experiments. He had the staying power to withstand the long hours of repetitive trials. And it would be the repeatable experiment structure, results from which had been so elusive in parapsychology's past that would drive Ingo’s laboratory experiences, from one set of experiments to another to ultimately SRI and Remote Viewing. Just how that occurred though, Ingo says was born from random “circumstances,” events which suddenly commenced, seemingly out of nowhere, the confluence of which goes like this:

1970 

US intelligence assesses the USSR to be spending millions of rubles annually on so-called “psychotronic” research. It was believed that the Soviets were heavily engaged in a parapsychology research program whose existence was classified and whose funding and control resided largely with the Ministry of Defense and possibly with the KGB. It is also believed the Soviets were conducting intelligence missions using parapsychology.

1971 

Physicist Harold (Hal) Puthoff affiliates with SRI. Ingo participates in an informal test of Kirlian photography at a party during which he produces, by thought alone, a ball of light above his head as captured in a photograph now in his archives at the University of West Georgia. A few months later Ingo meets Robert Monroe, founder of the Monroe Institute, an altered states of consciousness researcher, and the CIA’s interrogation specialist, Cleve Backster at another party. Ingo begins working in Backster’s lab. Backster was working on analyzing the effects of his consciousness on plants. The plants, hooked up to polygraphs, would register Ingo’s intention to harm them at the moment of that intention. The results, though controversial, appear to have demonstrated this successfully and are documented as “the Backster Effect” in The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. This leads to Ingo working with Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler. For these experiments Ingo effects changes to thermometers placed inside sealed thermistors. This work leads to Ingo performing the out-of-body distance viewing experiments at the ASPR in New York City with Drs. Karlis Osis and Janet Lee Mitchell. The term “Remote Viewing” is born.

1972

Puthoff submits a proposal on basic research into quantum biology to Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement. A copy of this proposal is sent to Backster. Ingo experiences a breakthrough of sorts while doing flicker fusion experiments at the ASPR with Dr. Carole Kendig which went on to have tremendous importance when Controlled Remote Viewing was later developed at SRI. The problem had not been seeing too little but seeing too much. This “seeing too much” regarding perceptual states external to eye vision was ultimately to become a workhorse in the development of Controlled Remote Viewing. Ingo’s successes at the ASPR are mind-blowing but the ASPR board worries they are too good and will not publish them. Ingo becomes entirely frustrated with the ASPR and ESP research; Backster shows the Puthoff proposal to Ingo. Ingo and Puthoff connect. Puthoff’s proposal is funded by Science Unlimited Research Foundation. Puthoff invites Ingo for a week-long visit to SRI. As Ingo had previously participated in experiments effecting changes in thermometers, Puthoff wants to see a demonstration of such abilities for himself. Puthoff takes Ingo to a “well-shielded magnetometer” used for physics experiments located in a vault below the floor of the building at Stanford. Ingo “perturbs the operation of the magnetometer” and then draws a “reasonable facsimile” of the interior of the machine, the design of which has never been published.A second physicist, Russell Targ affiliates with SRI. Testing on “psychics,” Ingo first and foremost, begins at the hands of SRI project leaders Puthoff and Targ where a host of random ESP experiments led to the discovery of Remote Viewing using geographical coordinates, after Ingo had discussions with ARPANET researcher and future ufologist Jacques Vallee in the SRI cafeteria. The DIA begins funding SRI “to determine whether anomalous mental phenomena (i.e., extrasensory perception and psychokinesis) existed and the degree to which such phenomena might be applicable to problems of national interest.”

1973 

Ingo suggests the first of what will go to be several clandestine-supported psychic projects using Remote Viewing to view targets at geographical locations. Sponsored by the CIA, it was called Project SCANATE, the name having been derived from the process of scanning by coordinate. A 2002 CIA declassified document entitled Project SCANATE: Exploratory Research in Remote Viewing, CIA-RDP79-00999A000400050002-4 provides insight into Ingo’s early work on this, and incorporates some of his RV sketches. Pat Price joins the program. The following year, Price conducts the CIA’s most famous test of a Soviet nuclear facility, ‘URDF-3’, near Semipalatinsk. The CIA monitor assigned to oversee this work begins to question Price and the possibility he is Scientology or Soviet plant.

1975 

The CIA terminates its SRI contract following the suspicious death of Pat Price. The US Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division (FTD), the Air Forces’ scientific and intelligence wing focusing on foreign air, space, and ballistic missile systems, working under DIA’s intelligence production guidance, takes over from the CIA as the primary sponsor of Remote Viewing research, with Dale Graff, aerospace engineer and physicist, presiding. Dutton Books publishes Ingo’s autobiography To Kiss Earth Good-bye in which Ingo details his unclassified work at SRI and what led to his early ESP experiments.

1977 

Puthoff and Targ publish their book Mindreach about the unclassified aspects of their Remote Viewing work. Working with Graff at FTD, SRI’s psi program, spying on the Soviet Union, continues in deepest secrecy. Stephan Schwartz of the Mobius Group funds SRI to trial the ability of Ingo and photographer Hella Hammid, “Price’s replacement,” to remote view when submerged in a submarine. Classified aspects of the trial are sponsored by Graff at FTD. Hammid came to the program having in 1973 participated in the first Gateway Voyage program, a program of expanded awareness, offered by Robert Monroe, founder of The Monroe Institute, held at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA, where such things as sensory awakening and gestalt awareness training were used to enhance human potentials. The US Army begins its own Remote Viewing experiments under the code name “Gondola Wish.” The program was designed to integrate the Soviet parapsychology collection threat into an OPSEC (operations security protocol that prevents sensitive materials from getting in the wrong hands) by training military personnel to collect sensitive intelligence data through parapsychological means, particularly to gage the military applications of Remote Viewing and telekinesis. Some of Ingo’s work on this project can be found in the CIA declassified document: CIA-RDP96-00788R001800060001-7.

1978 

Gondola Wish becomes established under its Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), then renamed “Grill Flame,” and instituted at Fort Meade, MD. Dell Publishing releases Ingo’s novel Star Fire, about a rock superstar-composer Dan Merriweather, the world's first true megapsychic, and how he discovers the true extent of his extraordinary powers, while his out-of-body voyages reveal the existence of top-secret US and Russian installations for the development of psychic weapons more frightening than any nuclear or bacteriological hardware.

1979 

The first Army operational Remote Viewing session is carried out in collaboration with Graff at FTD. SRI is formally integrated into the Army program. The Air Force cancels its FTD-run RV program. The effort is picked up Jack Vorona of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

1982 

The first two Army students are trained in CRV by Ingo: Thomas M. McNear, CPT, US Army (Retired as a Lieutenant Colonel) and Robert (Rob) Cowart, Army designation unknown.

1983 

Grill Flame is re-designated by INSCOM as Project “Center Lane,” and continues with using psychoenergetics, namely Remote Viewing, to gather intelligence.

1984 

The existence of the top-secret aspects of the Remote Viewing program is disclosed by syndicated columnist Jack Anderson in The Washington Post. Behind closed doors, the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council unfavorably reviews the program. Ingo trains William (Bill) Ray, CPT, US Army (Retired as a Major), Paul H. Smith, CPT, US Army (Retired as a Major), Edward Dames, CPT, US Army (Retired as a Major), and Charlene Mettee Cavanaugh (Shufelt), DAC, US Army as operational remote viewers. The Army terminates funding for RV. 

1985

The Army remote viewers all transfer to the DIA. Puthoff leaves SRI for the Institute of Advanced Studies, Austin, TX. Nuclear physicist Edwin (Ed) May becomes SRI program head.

1986 

The DIA takes formal control of Remote Viewing, renaming it “Sun Streak.”

1987

Bantam Books publishes Ingo's how to guide on ESP/RV entitled Natural ESP: The ESP Core and Its Raw Characteristics. Puthoff writes the introduction.

1988 

Ingo retires from active RV research.

1990 

Graff becomes head of the operational RV unit at Ft. Meade and renames the project “Star Gate.”