The Foundations of Controlled Remote Viewing

The first long-term use of Remote Viewing as an intelligence collection method, now known as the STAR GATE Project, was the largest government-funded program in the history of parapsychological research in the Western world. The development of Remote Viewing was carried out over a period of more than 20 years (1972 to 1995) by researchers in collaboration with U.S. military and intelligence agencies. To the program we owe the first written Remote Viewing Protocol (CRV), which is the origin of all protocol variants used today.

To really understand, much less master, most disciplines require a good grounding in that discipline’s foundations and essentials, and new folks tend to miss that part of remote viewing. Unfortunately, finding easy access to the foundational resources can be difficult for those who have newly arrived. And it’s not just a problem for newcomers. Many of those who discovered remote viewing long ago don’t have a firm grasp on the origins or the principles.

Just as happens in other aspects of life, lack of knowledge leads to many needless repetitions of “reinventing the wheel.” One beginning remote viewer after another has to learn lessons and solve problems through trial and error—problems that were put to bed years before. Since Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) forms the rootstock for most the varieties of remote viewing being practiced today, this is especially true for those trying to master it.

It is that problem which The Foundations of Controlled Remote Viewing is meant to solve, with its authoritative collection of foundational documents.

Foundations gives you a major start on the context, origins, and development of Controlled Remote Viewing that many have missed by coming into the field in the middle of the story. It offers much about the theories and general outlines of how remote viewing—and especially Controlled Remote Viewing—works, and how to get the most out of it.

On the 6th of June 1972, I had no idea that what I was about to do would herald the creation of a whole new research discipline. Accompanied by artist and parapsychology researcher Ingo Swann, whom I had just barely met, we had traveled to the Varian Physics Building at Stanford University. Within a short time Ingo had not only just significantly affected a sensitive and sophisticated, well-shielded scientific instrument with his focused attention, but had also accurately remote viewed its inaccessible interior. My report on Swann’s achievement reached the ears of the Central Intelligence Agency and resulted in the launching of a multi-decade field of research that continues to this day in an ever-flourishing host of venues.

As one can well imagine, when we embarked on remote viewing research at SRI International virtually everything we did sparked criticism and controversy. But since much of our initial work was classified, we had only a narrow segment of the United States government—and virtually none of the American public—with whom we had to deal to any extent. Nonetheless, senators and congressmen, oversight committees, skeptical government scientists, and intelligence community officials were more than enough to keep us busy. At the time, however, we had no expectation of a looming horizon in which details of our work would become broadly public. But in 1995 they were revealed unexpectedly, and the numbers of the public who came to know at least something about the SRI remote viewing program mushroomed. And whenever you add a large number of people into a conversation about any truly novel subject, you can expect to see an increasingly large volume of opinions, speculations and discourse, and this we did.

Perhaps one of the most controversial elements to emerge from the SRI program was a major project that Ingo Swann, modern remote viewing’s “discoverer,” and I undertook together: The development of “coordinate” (now called “controlled”) remote viewing, or CRV. During early experiments in which a remote viewer was asked to describe a remote site being visited by an outbound traveler, it became clear that it was not the case of telepathic transfer from the outbounder to the remote viewer, but rather that the outbounder simply served as a “beacon” who designated the target by his presence; e.g., the remote viewer would often describe correctly target elements that were unknown to the outbounder. Once that came to light, it was a small step to consider designating a target by other beacon techniques, including simply by coordinates, latitude and longitude—hence the original designation for CRV as coordinate remote viewing. 

As further research was carried out, several factors of significance emerged. Valid observations tended to emerge in bits and pieces rather than by whole cloth, and so a mental rush to judgment (a form of mental noise that we designated “analytical overlay”) was to be avoided; accurate information tended to be in the form of visceral responses such as form, sensations, and colors rather than just complete visual images; “right-brain” overviews vs. “left-brain” analyses appeared to be more fruitful; etc. Integration of these insights into training procedures led to the expanded interpretation of CRV now designated as Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV).

At the request of the commanding general of the Army’s premier intelligence organization, the Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), we set about to assemble and further build upon the voluminous data and experience we had gleaned over the previous decade of research at SRI. Our assigned mission was to develop an organized, coherent, and effective way to pass along remote viewing skills to novice military remote viewers. In this we were intrinsically aided by our observation that, as with athletic or musical ability, there appeared to be a general bell curve in the population of remote viewing talent. Therefore, Ingo and I worked together to hone the CRV techniques, carefully teasing out what worked and what didn’t, always keeping in mind the peculiarities and strengths of human perception as it functioned in what the lay public would call an ESP program. At the time we realized that the CRV method would work just as well for those not in the military—in other words, normal everyday citizens. However, given the security envelope surrounding the SRI research, we never gave a thought to the possibility that those citizens might actually ever get a crack at the finely-honed techniques developed for the INSCOM remote viewers.

Following the 1995 release of details of the SRI/INSCOM CRV training routine, however, the processes became widely known, and there was a burgeoning of additional novel remote viewing methods introduced by various newcomers to the field. Such a proliferation, some of which are mutations from the original CRV process, adds to the corpus of options to be explored. 

Carefully-researched innovation is always welcome, but one outcome of the above process is that the original framework that Ingo’s and my intensive collaboration yielded has become somewhat obscured by the many voices emerging in the remote viewing community as new ideas and modifications are added to the mix. For this reason, I welcome this new book in its goal of seeking to help anchor some of the fundamental literature for remote viewing in general, and Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) in particular. The Foundations of Controlled Remote Viewing certainly won’t exhaust all the literature on CRV that deserves publication now or in the future, but it is an excellent initial starting point for those interested in or committed to the controlled remote viewing methodology in its original form.

Harold E. ”Hal” Puthoff, Ph.D.
Director, Institute for Advanced Studies, Austin, Texas
Former director, Consciousness Studies Program, SRI-International