The remote viewing program at the Stanford Research Institute operated as part of Stanford University throughout the early 1970s, after which it became an independent organization, called Stanford Research International. The remote viewing program was founded by Harold Puthoff, who was joined early on by Targ and a few years later by physicist Edwin May. Puthoff left SRI in 1985, and May took over the leadership of the organization. In 1990, the remote viewing program moved to Science Applications International corporation (SAIc), a big defense contractor. In 1994, the program ended (so we are told, anyway), after 24 years and $20 million from the cIA, defense Intelligence Agency, Army intelligence, navy intelligence, and nASA. Radin (1997, p. 98) noted: “The agencies continued to show interest in remote viewing for more than twenty years because the SRI and SAIc programs occasionally provided useful mission-oriented information at high levels of detail.”
In one test case in the intelligence-gathering program, supervisors gave a remote viewer only the barest amount of information about a target—that it was “a technical device somewhere in the United States.” According to Radin the target was actually “a high-energy microwave generator in the Southwest.” Unaware of this, the viewer made drawings and gave verbal descriptions of an object the same size and shape as the microwave generator. He correctly stated that its beam divergence angle was 30 degrees (May 1995, p. 204; in Radin 1997, p. 99).
In another case from the late 1970s, supervisors gave a remote viewer the map coordinates of a location in the United States. The remote viewer gave an accurate description of a super secret military installation. The very existence of this installation, located in virginia, was at the time extremely confidential. Radin (Puthoff 1996; in Radin 1997, p. 99) said the viewer “was able to describe accurately the facility’s interior and was even able to correctly sense the names of secret code words written on folders inside locked file cabinets.” In 1977, a reporter, who had learned about the remote viewer’s report, went to the spot to verify the existence of the military installation. The reporter saw just a hillside with sheep and concluded the report was not true. But the installation actually was at that spot—not on the surface, but underground (Radin 1997, p. 99).
In September of 1979, the national Security council of the United States became interested in knowing what the Soviet Union was doing inside a large building in northern Russia. Spy satellite photos of activities around the building indicated some kind of heavy construction, but the nSc wanted to know exactly what was happening inside. A remote viewer working for the army, chief Warrant Officer Joe McMoneagle, was assigned to the task (McMoneagle 1993, Schnabel 1997; in Radin 1997, pp. 194–195). The officers in charge of the project did not at first show McMoneagle the satellite photos or tell him anything about their content. They gave him only a set of map coordinates and asked what he could see at that location. He described large buildings and smokestacks in a cold location near a large body of water. After receiving this essentially accurate report, the officers showed McMoneagle the satellite photos of the building in which they were especially interested, and asked him to see what was going on inside. McMoneagle reported that a submarine was being constructed inside the building.
McMoneagle sketched a large vessel, much larger than any submarine in existence, with a long flat deck and tubes for eighteen or twenty missiles. The nSc officials were doubtful. The vessel was too big for a submarine, and the building was about a hundred yards from the water. Also, none of the intelligence services had picked up any reports of such a submarine under construction in the Soviet Union. Looking into the future, McMoneagle predicted that in four months time the Soviets would dig a canal from the building to the water to launch the submarine. In January of 1980, satellite photos revealed the submarine, the largest in the world, moving through a new artificial channel from the building to the harbor. The submarine had a flat deck and twenty missile tubes. It was the first typhoon class submarine. Radin (1997, p. 195) said, “Scientists who had worked on these highly classified programs, including myself, were frustrated to know firsthand the reality of high-performance psi phenomena and yet we had no way of publicly responding to skeptics. nothing could be said about the fact that the U.S. Army had supported a secret team of remote viewers, that those viewers had participated in hundreds of remote-viewing missions, and that the dIA, cIA, customs Service, drug Enforcement Agency, fBI, and Secret Service had all relied on the remote-viewing team for more than a decade, sometimes with startling results.”
In 1988, Edwin May, director of Stanford Research International, reviewed the results of all psychical research tests carried out at SRI from 1973 to 1988, involving over 26,000 trials in the course of 154 experiments. The odds that the success rate in these trials could have been the result of chance guesses were 1020 to one, more than a billion to one (Radin 1997, p. 101). In 1995, the congress of the United States asked the American Institutes for Research to review the cIA-sponsored remote viewing work carried out at Science Applications International corporation (SAIc) during the years 1989–1993. The two chief reviewers were dr. Jessica Utts, a statistics professor at the University of california at davis, favorable to psychical research, and dr. Ray Hyman, a long time critic of psychical research. Radin (1997, p. 101) noted, “The SAIc studies provided a rigorously controlled set of experiments that had been supervised by a distinguished oversight committee of experts from a variety of scientific disciplines. The committee included a nobel laureate physicist, internationally known experts in statistics, psychology, neuroscience, and astronomy, and a retired U. S. Army major general who was also a physician.”
In her evaluation, Jessica Utts concluded: “It is clear to this author that anomalous cognition is possible and has been demonstrated” (Utts 1996; in Radin 1997, p. 102). Utts also said: “The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research . . . have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud” (Utts 1996, p. 3; in Radin 1997, pp.4–5).
Even Ray Hyman found little to criticize: “I agree with Jessica Utts that the effect sizes reported in the SAIc experiments . . . probably cannot be dismissed as due to chance. nor do they appear to be accounted for by multiple testing, filedrawer distortions, inappropriate statistical testing or other misuse of statistical inference. . . . So, I accept Professor Utts’ assertion that the statistical results of the SAIc, and other parapsychological experiments, ‘are far beyond what is expected by chance.’ The SAIc experiments are well-designed and the investigators have taken pains to eliminate the known weaknesses in previous parapsychological research. In addition, I cannot provide suitable candidates for what flaws, if any, might be present” (Hyman 1996, p. 55; in Radin 1997 p. 103). nevertheless, he still was not prepared to admit that the tests confirmed psychical abilities. He proposed that although he was not able to identify any flaws, or even propose any possible flaws, that some flaws might be there. He therefore insisted on more “independent replication” of the results, although the results, in the course of twenty years, had already been independently repeated by different researchers at SRI and elsewhere.