The Remote Viewing Program

In 1972 the laser physicist Harold Puthoff, soon joined by fellow physicist Russell Targ, began a program of parapsychological research at SRI after conducting preliminary tests with the psychic claimant Ingo Swann, coining the term remote viewing for a procedure in which a subject attempted to describe a distant or hidden location known only to another experimenter.

The work quickly attracted U.S. intelligence agencies concerned that the Soviet Union was pursuing similar research, and the Central Intelligence Agency began funding SRI's program that same year, later joined by Army intelligence and, from the 1980s, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which took over management of the effort under the classified program eventually made public as the Stargate Project. Puthoff and Targ reported statistically significant results across many trials and published some of their work in the journal Nature and the Proceedings of the IEEE, claims other researchers, including psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann, argued could be explained by sensory and editorial cues in the judging process rather than genuine psychic perception. SRI's remote viewing contract ended in 1991 when the program's management moved to the private contractor Science Applications International Corporation, and the wider government effort was finally terminated in 1995 after an external review concluded any real effect was too weak and inconsistent to be of intelligence value, closing a chapter that remains the best documented instance of a Western government funding psychic research.