Case file · Remote viewing & psi research

SCANATE and the start of remote viewing at SRI

In 1972 the CIA funded physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute to test 'scanning by coordinate'.

1972 CE · 37.46, -122.18 · status: official

The account

Prompted by intelligence claims that the USSR spent heavily on 'psychotronic' research, SRI tested subjects, most famously Ingo Swann, who were asked to describe places given only map coordinates. Targ and Puthoff coined the term 'remote viewing'. The work became the root of two decades of US government psi research. A CIA Technical Services Division memo of 2 August 1972 forwards Puthoff's letter of 27 June 1972 on Swann and the shielded SQUID magnetometer in Stanford's Varian Physics building. The memo notes that the Life Sciences Division of the CIA's DDS&T already had 'a very active interest' in ESP. Staff were to meet Swann on 11 August, and a 'coordinating committee' on ESP was planned. DIA's 1983 Grill Flame report dates intelligence-community remote viewing to 1972, when the CIA contracted SRI, and cites SRI's final report to the CIA, 'Perceptual Augmentation Techniques' (December 1975); it describes the 1972-80 data as highly variable, good material mixed with much that was wrong (p.7, p.13). A later DIA briefing claims that Price and Swann's CIA-sponsored sessions gave detailed information later confirmed by human and technical sources (p.6).

The sceptical view

Critics found loose protocols, such as cues in the transcripts that judges could use to match targets, and selective reporting.

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Sources

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