Remote Viewing (RV) & Project Star Gate

Remote Viewing (RV) is a psychic phenomena not to be confused with the remote viewing of a person's PC desktop via another PC desktop. Project Star Gate is the name of a series of remote viewing experiments our government funded and is not to be confused with the popular "Stargate" movies or television series.

What exactly is Remote Viewing? Wikipedia describes RV as the "practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target," while "using extra-sensory perception (ESP)." A practitioner does not utilize their five senses - instead, they perceive (see or sense) with only their mind which is otherwise known as clairvoyance.

To better understand RV and how it works, consider this: You're sitting in your living room and without any outside influence or stimuli, you obtain an accurate real-time vision of a specific person, place, object or event outside of the range of your five senses (ex. at your neighbor's house, in the next town, state or country etc.). Obviously, you would need (confirmation) another person to be at the location or monitoring the location that you are seeing in order to verify your description.

The implications of RV, if plausible and reliable would then be staggering. From an intelligence or military perspective, one could know the battlefield up close and personal before entering it and the location of hidden enemies and whatever plans they may have without physically being in harm's way. Such an ability would become a powerful weapon for us or potentially used against us. With these considerations in mind, our government funded a program to study the effectiveness of Remote Viewing and implemented RV training. This research was conducted for 23+ years. According to Remoteviewed.com, in 1995, the CIA went public with the program and released "12,000 files totaling 89,000 pages of material" spanning the entire life of the project.

If you guessed the release of such information is evidence that nothing epic was discovered in the research, you guessed correctly. In fact, The Skeptic's Dictionary has published an excellent overview of RV and outlined its supporters and debunkers, CIA based studies as well as independent studies. To summarize, the CIA shut the project down because it was proven to be of "no practical value to the intelligence community." In addition, independent studies could not replicate the results.

Despite this end result, people have continued to believe that Remote Viewing is real and can be learned. This causes it to fall under the category of pseudoscience. Many movies, books, websites and how-to training manuals have been published. One of my favorite RV-related movies is Suspect Zero where a former FBI agent is trained in RV and uses it to catch a serial killer. I thought the concept was pretty cool but the DVD extras included information about Operation Star Gate which was far more interesting. All entertainment aside, many people seem smitten with the concept of RV which is precisely why the RV industry was born and still thrives today.