Psychic research / United States · CIA, then DIA programmes, with SRI International and SAIC as research contractors
The Evaluation of Remote Viewing
In June 1995 the CIA's Office of Research and Development contracted the American Institutes for Research to review the government's remote-viewing research and operations, which the report traces back to a CIA programme begun in 1972. Its two expert reviewers split over the laboratory results: Utts concluded that "psychic functioning has been well established", while Hyman held that competing hypotheses "have not yet been eliminated". The panel found that the information had never been used to guide an intelligence operation, and concluded that continued use "is not warranted".
The leading conventional explanation for the laboratory scores is judging and method. Hyman pointed out that SAIC's principal investigator, Ed May, "has been the sole judge in all the free response experiments". The panel left that question open, writing that it "remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated". On operational value it reached a firm conclusion: none.
AI illustration · not an evidence photograph
File
BR-0013
Date
CIA programme 1972–77, DIA from about 1985 · evaluation dated 29 September 1995
Place
United States · CIA, then DIA programmes, with SRI International and SAIC as research contractors
AssessmentB · documented by a commissioned outside evaluation, with a proponent's and a sceptic's review on file
The record on file
Witnesses
An outside panel contracted by the CIA: the statistician Jessica Utts and the psychologist Ray Hyman as expert reviewers, two AIR senior scientists with no background in parapsychology, and Lincoln Moses of Stanford as statistical adviser
Evidence
The American Institutes for Research's 206-page report, with both expert reviews, Utts's reply and the panel's points of agreement and disagreement. The panel reviewed about 80 publications from the SRI and SAIC laboratories and interviewed users of the operational unit
Record made at the time
An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications, by Michael D. Mumford, Andrew M. Rose and David A. Goslin of the American Institutes for Research, dated 29 September 1995 and released by the CIA on 22 May 2002 (CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180006-4, 206 pages).
Agency
American Institutes for Research, under contract to the CIA's Office of Research and Development
For more than twenty years, agencies of the United States government paid for research into "remote viewing", the claimed ability to describe a distant place or object by mental means alone, and for a small unit that tried to use it on intelligence targets. The work began with the CIA in 1972 and ended in 1995 with an outside evaluation that the CIA commissioned. That outside evaluation is the record that puts the case on this shelf.
What was reported
According to Kenneth Kress, a CIA project officer writing in the agency's journal Studies in Intelligence in 1977, the laser physicist Russell Targ met CIA scientific intelligence staff in April 1972. Targ had just joined Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, where he and Harold Puthoff began testing claimed psychics. A CIA-funded demonstration followed in August 1972, and a contract that October.
Kress records that CIA operational testing stopped after the death of the viewer Pat Price in 1975. The 1995 evaluation instead dates the end of the CIA programme to 1977. Military funding continued under a series of code names, which the Federation of American Scientists lists as Grill Flame, Center Lane and Sun Streak, before the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) programme became Star Gate in the early 1990s. SRI's laboratory work passed to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).
What evidence exists
The central document is An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications, by Michael Mumford, Andrew Rose and David Goslin of the American Institutes for Research (AIR), dated 29 September 1995. Congress had asked the CIA to consider taking the programme over from the DIA, and in June 1995 the CIA's Office of Research and Development contracted AIR to review it. The panel was deliberately split. Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California, Davis, was chosen to represent researchers who view paranormal interpretations positively, and Ray Hyman, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, to represent the sceptics. Two AIR scientists new to parapsychology and the Stanford statistician Lincoln Moses completed the panel. They reviewed about 80 publications from the two laboratories and interviewed the programme manager, the operational users and the three viewers still employed when the unit was suspended in the spring of 1995.
The 206-page report, with both reviews, Hyman's rejoinder and Utts's reply, is held in the CIA's online Reading Room as document CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180006-4. It was made public at the end of November 1995, when the Associated Press reported the study, but the Reading Room copy is stamped as approved for release on 22 May 2002. Kress's article and many SRI and SAIC reports are in the same STARGATE collection.
What investigators concluded
The reviewers disagreed in print. Utts concluded that "psychic functioning has been well established", with results "far beyond what is expected by chance". She put the effect size across 770 SRI sessions at 0.209 and across 455 SAIC sessions at 0.230. Hyman agreed that the SAIC experiments were free of the flaws of the early SRI work, and that the effects were "too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes". He did not accept that every alternative explanation had been ruled out, and wanted independent replication.
The panel's own conclusion was that, although "a statistically significant effect has been observed in the laboratory, it remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated". On the operational side it was firmer. An appendix found that from 1986 to early 1995 the unit received more than 200 tasks, and that in 1994–95 its three viewers answered 40 of them for five organisations, whose scores clustered at the middle of the scales. Users told the interviewers that the reports needed "substantial subjective interpretation", and that in no case had the information "ever been used to guide intelligence operations". The panel concluded that continued use "is not warranted", and the government's remote-viewing work ended in 1995.
The leading conventional explanation
For the laboratory scores the leading explanation is method, above all judging. Both reviewers agreed that only one judge, apparently the principal investigator, Edwin May, had matched viewers' descriptions to targets throughout the SAIC studies. With no independent judges, the panel wrote, the effect could not be separated from the judge's skill at reading ambiguous material or from "subtle, unintentional factors". The report also notes flaws in the early SRI work, such as cues from the time taken to drive to a site. In 1978 David Marks and Richard Kammann reported in Nature that their attempt to repeat Targ and Puthoff's experiments did not verify the original conclusions. For the operational results, the explanation is vague output read generously after the fact.
This explanation has weaknesses. Hyman himself wrote that he could not name a specific flaw in the SAIC experiments. Utts pointed to similar hit rates in ganzfeld studies at other laboratories, though Hyman disputed that those results were consistent.
What remains unexplained or disputed
The statistical question was left open. The panel said that independent judges would have to agree before the laboratory effect could be attributed to the viewers, and no government-funded programme followed to test that. Whether the effects reflect an unrecognised flaw is still argued between the camps Utts and Hyman represented. The operational question is not disputed in the record: the evaluation found no case in which remote viewing produced intelligence that anyone acted on.
CIA dials psychic connection(archived) — Richard Cole, Associated Press, in The Roanoke Times, 29 November 1995. Contemporary report of the study's release, with Hyman, Utts and a CIA spokesman.
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