SRI International, formerly the Stanford Research Institute, is an independent nonprofit research institute in California Menlo Park, where Jacques Vallée worked with affiliated scientists.1 Diana Walsh Pasulka’s research found that, like other scientists she had interviewed, Edgar Mitchell had also been involved with the institute.2
SRI became linked to research into Remote Viewing (RV), precognition, and extrasensory perception, studied at the institute at the same time and place as Vallée’s early internet research.3 According to American Cosmic, declassified documents from the 1970s and 1980s indicate SRI International was a research site for extraordinary research.4 Remote viewing and related esoteric skills were also studied there under a classified programme called The Stargate Project, funded by the US military in partnership with SRI.5 When organisers later set up Project STARGATE, they turned to SRI, where remote viewing had already been studied for nearly five years.6 Researchers at the institute are credited with coining the term “remote viewing” in the early 1970s.7 Its Cognitive Sciences Laboratory received considerable funding, carried out and supported extensive experimentation, and provided support to intelligence operations from 1972 through 1995.8
The remote-viewing programme was led by Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ. Puthoff’s career spanned decades of research at General Electric, Sperry Corporation, the National Security Agency (NSA), Stanford University, and SRI International.9 Most of the subjects Puthoff and Targ worked with displayed some degree of remote-viewing talent from the outset10 and, in a form of self-selection, voluntarily continued their involvement out of strong personal interest.11 Puthoff and Targ’s report, as recorded in Remote Viewing Secrets, held that subjects who trained over a one-year period performed excellently under a variety of experimental conditions,12 and that accumulated data indicated both specially selected and unselected people could be assisted in developing remote-perceptual abilities to a level of useful information transfer.13 An IEEE report on the research, cited in Remote Viewing Secrets, stated that the drawings subjects produced were generally more accurate than their verbal descriptions.14 Joseph McMoneagle later said that “perform well” in Puthoff and Targ’s report did not imply world-class remote viewing, but rather the ability to display psychic functioning under controlled conditions to a better-than-chance result.15
According to Puthoff and Targ’s report, as recorded in Remote Viewing Secrets, viewers should be self-selected,16 able to learn by example,17 and open to the possibility of paranormal information transfer,18 while being able to withstand public scrutiny, ridicule, and failure.19 The same report held that subjects should have artistic talent capable of expressing their perceptions through drawing or sketching,20 and should be able to process information within a high-stimulation environment such as the Ganzfeld procedure.21
Ingo Swann was a well-known psychic and remote viewer who worked with the laboratory at SRI.22 Swann developed Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) while working at the institute,23 and McMoneagle said that Swann’s suggestion to use map coordinates to identify a target gave rise to the Coordinate Remote Viewing system.24 The Outbounder Remote Viewing protocol was initially used exclusively by scientists at SRI.25 McMoneagle himself was formally trained in dowsing at the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory by an internationally known dowser,26 and consulted for SRI and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) from 1984 through 1995.27 He later observed that, over the course of their careers, every exceptional viewer studied at SRI’s Cognitive Sciences Laboratory and SAIC essentially produced a near flat-line in ability, with the best performing about as well at the start of their careers as at the end.28