Abstract
’Remote Viewing,’ popularly known as Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) is the ability of human being to perceive information and imagery of remote geographical targets. Advanced practitioners of the Indian Yoga system were well acquainted with ‘Divya Drishti.’
This paper deals with experiments conducted in USA in which certain individuals were trained to acquire such ‘Remote Viewing’ capabilities for collecting military intelligence.
Introduction
During the Cold War years, the USA and Soviet Union are known to have been spying on each other using the services of psychic ‘remote viewers’, with the specific objective of gathering intelligence information of military significance. In simple terms ‘remote viewing’ is ‘the ability of human participants to acquire information about spatially (and temporally) remote geographical targets otherwise inaccessible by any known sensory means’.
There were two complementary components to the US Remote Viewing programme:
(a) A research programme on ‘Anomalous Cognition (AC)’ directed initially by physicists Hal Putoff and Russell Targ at the laboratories of Stanford Research International (SRI) at Menlo Park, California which was shifted in 1988 to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), under the direction of Edwin May. The findings of their early studies have been reported in prestigious scientific journals during the 1970s. 1-3
(b) Mission-oriented operational assignments overseen by various intelligence agencies of the US Government, code-named Project STARGATE.
Information regarding this top-secret programme was partly declassified by the CIA in July 1995 following the thaw in the Cold War. Since then, several research articles 4 and many books 5-10 have been published by some of the persons who were closely associated with this programme. These authors have however expressed regret that they had not been permitted to reveal much of the ‘sensitive’ details of the programme. The present brief account is based on the published sources of information.
Background to Remote Viewing Faculty
The faculty of Remote Viewing is popularly also known as Extra Sensory Perception (or ESP for short), a term coined by the pioneering parapsychology researcher J.B. Rhine in 1934. Students of Indian Yogic lore are however well acquainted with it. Aphorism 3.26 of Patanjali’s classic work Yoga Sutras (400 B.C.) describes the first of the ashta-siddhis (or psychic powers) that a serious practitioner of Yoga can acquire as ‘obtaining knowledge of the small, the hidden or distant by directing the light of superphysical faculty’. Russell Targ, has commented that the techniques used by the US viewers for ‘looking into the distance and the future’ are ‘strikingly similar to the detailed instructions given in the Yoga Sutra!’
Most ancient civilisations appear to have been acquainted with the knowledge of this particular faculty of the human mind. In both Indian and Chinese scriptures there are instances of the clairvoyant skills of people being used as a tool for obtaining relevant military information in the battle-ground.
It is learnt that the US Government authorities started paying serious attention to investigating the possible applicability of ‘remote viewing’ techniques for military purposes only when a book titled Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, authored by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, was published in 1970 11 . This book appears to have jolted the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) into action, triggering what one journalist has dubbed as the ‘Race for Inner Space’! Hal Puthoff, the founder and first Director of the SRI Studies has given a graphic account of how it all began in his recollections of the programme. 6
Read More – Clairvoyant Remote Viewing: The US Sponsored Psychic Spying
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