The MoD remote-viewing study

The full file

In the months after the attacks of September 2001 the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence paid for a small trial of remote viewing, the claimed ability to describe a distant or hidden target by mental means alone. The trial ran in 2002, its report was classified, and the work was taken no further. Nothing about it was public until the report was released under the Freedom of Information Act in early 2007. This case rests on that report, a record made at the time by the people who ran the trial, not by anyone claiming the ability.

What was reported

The release was reported by BBC News on 23 February 2007 and by The Register the same day. By the BBC's account, the ministry first tried to recruit twelve "known" psychics who advertised their abilities on the internet. All of them refused, so "novice" volunteers were used instead. Commercial researchers were contracted, at a cost of £18,000, to test whether psychic ability existed and could be used for defence purposes. The volunteers were blindfolded and asked about the contents of sealed brown envelopes holding pictures, among them a knife, Mother Teresa and an "Asian individual". The BBC reported that most subjects "consistently failed", and that one fell asleep during his session.

A ministry spokeswoman told the BBC the study had been run "to assess claims made in some academic circles and to validate research carried out by other nations on psychic ability". She said it "concluded that remote viewing theories had little value to the MoD and was taken no further".

What evidence exists

The study report itself is the primary record. The ministry put it on its website after the Freedom of Information release, with many passages blanked out. That page now survives only on the UK Government Web Archive kept by the National Archives, where it sits behind an automated verification check; it was not opened for this entry, and the report's own figures and scoring method are described here only through others' reading of it.

The ministry has since confirmed the study in writing. In reply to a request in 2015, it stated that it "only undertook one study, in 2002, on remote viewing and no further work has been undertaken, nor is any planned", and that the study had been made public in 2007. The requester's letter, quoted in that reply, describes it as the "2001/2002" study and gives its release date as 12 January 2007, about six weeks before the press reports. Accounts of the report written from the released pages, notably one by the SPYSCAPE museum drawing on the researcher David Clarke's work, add that it was approved in 2001, ran to eighteen sessions in rented premises, and was based on a controlled remote-viewing manual downloaded from the internet. Those details have been seen in only that one account here.

What investigators concluded

The researchers' own verdict, as quoted from the report, was that the untrained subjects "rarely - if ever made an accurate assessment of the target", and that "as untrained Remote Viewers the subjects were almost completely unsuccessful". The ministry's policy conclusion, that the technique had "little value", followed from it. Mind Hacks, reading the released session logs in March 2007, quoted one in which the subject recorded only two images, the head of a bear or baboon and the word RATS, and in which the researchers judged that the target had clearly not been accessed. The 2015 reply shows the conclusion held: no later work was done.

The leading conventional explanation

The conventional reading is that there was no effect to explain. A blindfolded guess compared afterwards with a picture will sometimes look close, especially when the judge is generous about what counts as a match, and nothing in the press accounts shows that the trial compared its hits against a chance baseline. On the published descriptions, the researchers were indeed generous: SPYSCAPE reports that a sketch of a tower was taken as possibly "representative" of Mother Teresa's burial place. The study's own authors reached the negative conclusion, so this explanation is not an outsider's gloss but the record's own finding.

Its weakness is the one any null result carries. Eighteen sessions with a handful of volunteers who had never tried remote viewing is a small test, and proponents argue that it says little about trained viewers, which by SPYSCAPE's account the report itself acknowledged by treating the trial as a baseline for possible later work with experts.

What remains disputed

The headline figure is not settled. The BBC said 28 per cent "of those tested" made a close guess; The Register, working from the BBC's report, said volunteers made a close guess 28 per cent of the time; SPYSCAPE gives it as sessions in which viewers "may have accessed some feature of the target". Those are three different statistics, and without the report's scoring sheets it cannot be said which is right. The 2015 requester read the report as showing that some subjects accessed some targets, which sits awkwardly beside its "almost completely unsuccessful" verdict. The purpose of the trial is also open: the former MoD official Nick Pope suggested to The Guardian that it was meant for finding hidden weapons or Osama bin Laden, which the ministry has never confirmed, and the redactions do not settle it.

Sources

• MoD defends psychic powers study (archived) — BBC News, 23 February 2007. The FOI release, recruitment of novices, £18,000 cost, envelope method, 28 per cent figure and the spokeswoman's statements.
• UK forces tested, rejected psychic techniques (archived) — Joe Fay, The Register, 2007. Report of the release, based on the BBC's, with the 28 per cent "close guess" figure and the "little value" conclusion.
• FOI response FOI2015/07347 (archived) — Ministry of Defence, 2015. Confirms the single 2002 study, its 2007 release and that no further work was done or planned.
• Spies, psychic power and the mystical hunt for Osama bin Laden (archived) — SPYSCAPE, undated. Quotations from the released report, the eighteen sessions, the 2001 approval and Nick Pope's comment, drawing on David Clarke.
• MoD 'remote viewing' documents online (archived) — Vaughan Bell, Mind Hacks, 2007. The report's posting on the MoD website, the redactions and a session log with the researchers' assessment.