What is remote viewing?

Remote Viewing (RV) is the attempt to gather information about a distant, unseen target using extra-sensory perception. A remote viewer is asked to give information about an object or place that is hidden from physical view and/or separated by distance. Parapsychologists Russell Targ and Dr. Hal Puthoff coined the term in 1974.

Remote viewers are generally given coordinates of a site and after "cooling down" (entering a state of deep relaxation) give impressions of what they "see". Remote viewers have claimed to be able to see things not only at a distance (including long distances such as Mars and our moon) but also see things back and forward in time.

Remote viewing is generally considered as pseudoscience due to the need to overcome fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles held by the scientific community, and the lack of a positive theory that explains the outcomes.

Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a 20 million dollar research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena.

One of the most famous, and considered the father of RV, is Ingo Swann whose ability to correctly describe targets was considered far beyond coincidence. Much of what is known about RV came from the experiments done with Swann. At SRI, Swann and Puthoff developed a remote-viewing training program meant to enable any individual with a suitable background to produce useful data. As part of this project, a number of military officers and civilians were trained and formed a military remote viewing unit. The viewing methodology (now called "controlled" remote viewing, or CRV) they created is the core of almost all remote viewing training programs today.

The government RV program was terminated in 1995, citing a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community. Although it looks more like politics within various government agencies, rather then lack of success, was what really caused the program to be terminated.

Many of the original RVers have since started their own RV institutes to train the general public on how to do RV. They have also written numerous books on the subject of RV, the military's use of RV, and how to learn RV. I'll talk about some of those books later. But one you could read immediately, and should if you are interested in RV, is Ingo Swanns' book called "Penetration: the Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy." This book is out of print and hard to find but there is an online pdf download source here.
(if the link doesn't work, go to http://www.scribd.com and do a search for Ingo Swann Penetration.)

Swann's Penetration is a fast and fasinating read. The story he tells about his involvement with RV, Men in Black, and extraterrestials reads like a sci-fi thriller. But he says its all true.

I'm currently reading some other books on RV and will post my opinions on them here later.