What is Remote Viewing | PsychicSmile
What is Remote Viewing: Seeing Without Being There
What is remote viewing? It is the claimed ability to describe a distant place, object or event without visiting it and without using any ordinary means of information, such as a photograph, a map or a report. A remote viewer is given a target, often nothing more than a set of coordinates or a sealed reference number, and is asked to describe what is there: the shape of a building, the curve of a coastline, the contents of a room. The viewer reports impressions, sketches and words, and those reports are later compared with the real target. The claim is striking because it is testable in a way that many psychic claims are not. Either the description matches the target or it does not, and that clarity is why remote viewing drew the attention of scientists, soldiers and skeptics alike.
The idea has older roots than most people realize. Travelers and mystics have long reported seeing distant places in dreams or visions, and the nineteenth century literature of Spiritualism is full of accounts of clairvoyant travel. But remote viewing as a named practice with a formal method is a product of the twentieth century, and its most famous chapter was written inside the United States government. For more than two decades, American intelligence agencies paid people to try to see things they could not see, and the records of that program are now public. This page explains the method, the history, the evidence and the limits, with the facts kept separate from the claims.
The Stargate Program: The Declassified Record
The story begins in 1972, when physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ at the Stanford Research Institute, known as SRI, in Menlo Park, California, began studying a New York artist named Ingo Swann. Swann had claimed since childhood that he experienced perceptions of distant places and events that he had no ordinary way of knowing. Puthoff and Targ designed experiments around him, and Swann helped develop a structured protocol: instead of waiting for a spontaneous vision, a viewer would be given a pair of geographic coordinates, latitude and longitude, with no other information, and asked to describe what was there.
The work drew government funding because it arrived at a moment of Cold War anxiety. American intelligence officials had heard reports that the Soviet Union was researching psychic phenomena, and they worried about falling behind in an area they barely understood. What began as a CIA research contract grew into a long running program that passed through several code names and several agencies. The Army began its own unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, in 1977, under the name Gondola Wish, and formalized it as the operational program Grill Flame in 1978. The program was known at different times as Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane and Sun Streak, and it received its final umbrella name, Star Gate, in the early 1990s. The research contract moved from SRI to the Science Applications International Corporation in 1991.
The program ended in 1995. That year, Congress directed that it be transferred from the Defense Intelligence Agency to the CIA. The CIA commissioned an independent review from the American Institutes for Research, led by statistician Jessica Utts and psychologist Ray Hyman, who reached different conclusions. Utts concluded that the laboratory results showed a real effect that could not be explained by chance. Hyman concluded that the evidence did not establish a psychic mechanism and that methodological problems could explain the results. The closure came first: the CIA terminated the program on June 30, 1995, before the review had begun its work, stating that remote viewing had not produced intelligence of practical value, and the American Institutes for Research report was delivered later that September. The records were declassified, and in 2017 the CIA released a large set of Stargate files into its public reading room. The total cost of the program over its lifetime is commonly reported at around 20 million dollars, a figure that appears in the declassified record and in later accounts.
The People Who Did the Viewing
Ingo Swann, who lived from 1933 to 2013, was the intellectual architect of the method. He developed what became known as Controlled Remote Viewing, a step by step procedure designed to keep the viewer from guessing, inventing or letting imagination take over. Swann argued that the first impressions a viewer receives are the most reliable, and that the conscious mind, with its habit of naming and judging, is the enemy of accurate viewing. His method trained viewers to report raw sensory impressions first, shapes, textures, temperatures, colors, and only later to allow themselves to name what those impressions might be.
Other viewers became well known in their own right. Pat Price, a former police officer from Burbank, California, was one of the early SRI subjects, and his descriptions of distant locations impressed the researchers who worked with him. Joseph McMoneagle, a career Army intelligence officer, became the most decorated viewer in the military unit, and after the program ended he wrote openly about his work and taught the method to civilians. His accounts are detailed and specific, and they are also, it should be said, accounts by a man describing his own successes. The program's records contain many sessions, and they include striking hits and plain misses in roughly the proportions you would expect from a difficult task performed by fallible people.
How a Remote Viewing Session Works
A formal remote viewing session is deliberately boring, and that is by design. The viewer sits at a table with paper and pens. A monitor, the person running the session, gives the viewer a target reference, usually a set of coordinates or a random number that stands for the target. The monitor knows what the target is, or in a double blind session knows nothing about it either, and the viewer is asked to describe it without any further information. The viewer begins by writing down immediate impressions: hot or cold, hard or soft, open or enclosed, natural or man made. Then the viewer sketches, often rough shapes and lines, and adds words that come to mind. The session proceeds in stages, with the viewer returning to the target again and again, each time adding detail and checking the earlier impressions against the new ones.
Controlled Remote Viewing has six formal stages, and each stage has rules. Stage one records basic sensory impressions. Stage two adds more sensory detail and a sense of dimension. Stage three produces a sketch. Stage four explores the target in more depth, including emotional and intangible impressions. Stage five brings in analytical thinking, and stage six produces a three dimensional model of the target. The discipline of the method is its point. Without stages, a viewer will simply say the first thing that comes to mind, and the first thing that comes to mind is usually a guess drawn from memory or imagination. With stages, the viewer is trained to slow down and to separate raw impression from interpretation.
There are other methods. Associative Remote Viewing uses a different design, aimed at predicting an outcome rather than describing a place, and it has been used by some practitioners to try to forecast events such as sports results. Extended Remote Viewing drops the rigid stages in favor of a longer, more relaxed session. The differences between the schools are real, and practitioners argue about them, but they share the same core claim: that a person can obtain information about a target they have no ordinary way of knowing.
What the Evidence Actually Shows
The evidence for remote viewing is the most studied body of evidence for any psychic claim, and it is also the most argued over. That is not a contradiction. It is the natural result of a program that ran for 23 years, produced thousands of sessions, and ended with a split verdict.
On one side, the laboratory results were genuinely interesting. In the SRI experiments of the 1970s, viewers described distant locations with a level of detail that impressed the researchers, and statistical analyses of the results showed performance above chance. Jessica Utts, in her part of the 1995 review, concluded that the effect was real and replicable, and that the probability of the results being due to chance was very small. She pointed to consistency across laboratories and to effect sizes that held up in different settings. That is a serious claim from a serious statistician, and it is why remote viewing cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand.
On the other side, the operational record was weak. The review found that in no case had remote viewing information been used to guide an intelligence operation, and that the information provided was often vague, incomplete or mixed with errors. Ray Hyman argued that the laboratory results could be explained by methodological flaws, including sensory leakage, where the viewer picks up clues from the monitor or the setting, and by the file drawer problem, where successful sessions are remembered and failed ones are forgotten. The CIA's own conclusion was practical rather than philosophical: whatever was happening in the laboratory, it was not producing intelligence worth paying for.
The honest summary is this. Remote viewing produced laboratory results that some qualified researchers found statistically significant, and it produced operational results that its own sponsors found unusable. Those two facts can both be true, and they are both part of the record. Anyone who tells you the program proved psychic powers is leaving out the 1995 review. Anyone who tells you it proved nothing is leaving out Utts. The declassified files are public, and they reward anyone willing to read them with patience.
An Illustrative Example: Sam and the Coordinates
This example is illustrative, not a real person's story.
Sam, a 34 year old software tester, learned about Controlled Remote Viewing from a book and decided to try it with a friend. His friend picked a target, a lighthouse on the coast, wrote down its coordinates, and gave Sam only the numbers. Sam sat at his kitchen table, wrote down his first impressions, and sketched what came to mind. His first words were tall, round, white, water, wind. His sketch showed a vertical shape beside a wide horizontal band. When his friend revealed the target, Sam was thrilled. Then they did the honest thing and repeated the experiment ten more times with different targets. Sam scored well on two, poorly on five, and produced vague sketches on the rest. He kept the lighthouse page because it was the best one, and he also kept the other ten, because they told the fuller story. Sam still practices remote viewing as a hobby, but he no longer tells people about the lighthouse without mentioning the other ten sessions. That is the difference between a story and evidence, and it is the standard the Stargate reviewers tried to apply.
Remote Viewing Today
After declassification, remote viewing moved from government offices into the public sphere. Former viewers teach courses, books describe the method in detail, and online communities run practice targets where anyone can try a session and compare their results with the answer. The practice has also spread into areas the original program never intended, including attempts to view the past, the future and distant planets. Those extensions are not part of the declassified record, and they should be treated as personal exploration rather than established practice.
If you want to try remote viewing yourself, the responsible way is the way the SRI researchers designed it: blind targets, written records, and honest scoring. Ask a friend to pick a target you know nothing about, give you only a reference number, and keep the answer sealed until you finish. Write down every impression before you look at the answer, and score yourself strictly. A vague word like building does not count. A specific detail, such as a red door beside a stone wall, does. Run the experiment many times, not once, and keep every session, including the failures. That discipline is the real legacy of the Stargate program, whatever one thinks of its results.
Remote viewing is also worth understanding in the wider context of psychic abilities. It is closely related to clairvoyance, the claimed ability to perceive things beyond normal sight, which our page on what is clairvoyance explains. It differs from mediumship, where the claim is communication with a person rather than perception of a place, and what is a medium sets out that distinction. And it differs from a seance, which is a group sitting with its own history and rules, described on what is a seance. Knowing which ability you are talking about is the first step toward judging any of them fairly. If you are drawn to developing perception of this kind, how to develop mediumship offers a grounded view of the training that practitioners themselves recommend. The mediumship hub gathers more on the wider world of mediumship and related abilities.
If the declassified record leaves you curious about seeing clearly for yourself, talking it through with a reader can help you sort what the evidence means for your own questions. First 3 minutes FREE — every time, for every reading, with all advisors.
For a simple next step, try a One-Card Tarot reading and reflect on what you would most want to see clearly if distance were no barrier.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is remote viewing in simple terms?
Remote viewing is the claimed ability to describe a distant place, object or event without visiting it or using any ordinary source of information. A viewer is given only a target reference, such as coordinates or a random number, and reports impressions, words and sketches that are later compared with the real target.
Did the CIA really run a remote viewing program?
Yes. The program began with a CIA research contract at the Stanford Research Institute in 1972, passed through Army and Defense Intelligence Agency units under several code names, and was called Star Gate in its final years. It was terminated on June 30, 1995, before the independent review by the American Institutes for Research reported that September, and its records were declassified.
What did the 1995 review conclude about remote viewing?
The review split. Statistician Jessica Utts concluded the laboratory results showed a real effect beyond chance, while psychologist Ray Hyman concluded the evidence did not establish a psychic mechanism. The program had already been closed on June 30, 1995, before the report was delivered, and the CIA's stated reason was that remote viewing had not produced intelligence of practical value.
Can anyone learn remote viewing?
Practitioners say yes, and they teach a structured method called Controlled Remote Viewing. The responsible way to try it is with blind targets, written records and strict scoring over many sessions, keeping the failures as well as the successes. A single striking hit is not evidence on its own.
What is the difference between remote viewing and clairvoyance?
Clairvoyance is the broader claimed ability to perceive things beyond normal sight, including distant places, hidden objects and sometimes the future. Remote viewing is a specific, structured form of clairvoyance with a formal protocol, a target reference and a scoring method, developed largely inside the Stargate program.
Last updated: November 12, 2026
