Remote Viewing

Remote viewing is a claimed psychic ability: describing, by mental processes, information that distance or shielding hides from ordinary perception. In the early 1970s Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ began a remote-viewing program at SRI International. According to SRI's own assessments, controlled trials with viewers such as Ingo Swann and Pat Price gave statistically anomalous results.

In 1978 the Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency began Project Grill Flame, run through the Army's Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). It set out to assess the threat from foreign psychoenergetics achievements and to explore remote viewing for intelligence collection. The work continued under later names, including the INSCOM Center Lane Project. Whether it passed formally to the Stargate Project is not established. Albert Stubblebine, INSCOM's commander from 1981 to 1984, was a primary sponsor of the Army's program. Project 8200 is a remote-viewing effort, and so is Project SUNSTREAK.

On one account, the American Institutes for Research evaluated the program before it ended. The statistician Jessica Utts argued that the statistical evidence was robust; the skeptic Ray Hyman argued that the operational value was nil. The government, by that account, concluded that even if an effect existed it produced no actionable intelligence, and ended the program. That account calls the statistical debate unresolved.

PSI-Tech, a private company launched in 1989, offered remote viewing commercially, and the ATP Working Group studied it alongside UFOs. In a 1992 lecture, Stubblebine claimed that remote viewing could access and track UFOs.