Remote viewing · 13 MIN READ · 8 SOURCE QUOTES
SRI and the origins of remote viewing
Remote viewing began as a laboratory project at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. In 1972 the laser physicist Hal Puthoff began experiments with the New York artist and psychic Ingo Swann, and his fellow physicist Russell Targ soon joined him. They chose the term "remote viewing" for an old idea: describing a distant or hidden place by mental means alone. The CIA funded the early work, and other gifted subjects, most famously Pat Price, worked alongside Swann. Puthoff and Targ described their experiments for the public in the book Mind-Reach.
The Army arrived by two routes. Army research agencies placed their own contracts with SRI in the late 1970s, and an Army intelligence group at Fort Meade, Maryland, after first planning to train its people in Robert Monroe's out-of-body technique, adopted SRI's remote viewing as the model for its own unit. SRI interviewed and tested the first Army viewers, including Joe McMoneagle, supplied the personal traits the Army screened for, and later trained Army viewers under contract in Ingo Swann's structured method, coordinate remote viewing.
SRI and Monroe knew each other from the start. When DIA asked SRI about Monroe on the Army's behalf in 1978, Targ and Puthoff said they knew him personally, and SRI said it studied remote viewing, not out-of-body experience. Skip Atwater recalls a photograph of Monroe at SRI with Price and Targ. The paths crossed again in the 1980s, when a remote viewer who had worked with SRI consulted in Monroe's laboratory and Monroe began describing remote viewing to Gateway Voyage groups as a different state from going out of body.
Remote viewing began in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute with Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ and Ingo Swann, then became the Army's model.
Key points
1972: Puthoff and Swann start the experiments
Skip Atwater's version of the story begins with Puthoff, who became interested in Swann and in 1972 ran a series of experiments with him, publishing reports that Atwater says appeared in the IEEE engineering journal. When the CIA heard about the work, Atwater says, it asked Puthoff to replicate experiments described in foreign paranormal research to see whether the claimed results were real. McMoneagle tells it the same way: the CIA was impressed that Swann and Pat Price could produce so much information about sites deep inside the Soviet Union and about classified American facilities.
A name chosen to sound scientific
Army papers from 1983 and 1984 credit SRI with coining the term "remote viewing" and define it as acquiring and describing, by mental means, information blocked from ordinary perception by distance, shielding or time. Atwater says Puthoff and Targ avoided words like clairvoyance and telepathy partly because they doubted such terms could win government funding. Monroe made the same point to a 1986 Gateway group, comparing it with his own dislike of the phrase "astral projection."
The outbounder experiment
SRI's signature test was a scientific version of hide and seek. Targ sat in a room with the viewer, paper and pencil, while Puthoff drove to a location chosen at random from a pool. At an agreed time the viewer described where Puthoff was, with neither Targ nor the viewer knowing the site. An independent judge then compared the description with the real site and with five other randomly chosen locations to see whether it matched the true target best. McMoneagle describes going through six of these trials himself.
The early results that got the military's attention
Center Lane briefings from 1983 credit the field's momentum to what they call astounding successes by two laser physicists at SRI. They say CIA-sponsored tests with gifted subjects produced detailed information, some previously unreported, about a secret NSA facility and a Soviet research site at Semipalatinsk; one version adds guerrilla training bases in Libya. They add that the CIA later stepped back from active work for political reasons while staying interested, and that the military services and DIA ran their own tests.
Army research contracts with SRI
One of these briefings traces the Army's interest to 1972, when its medical intelligence agency and DIA published studies of Soviet bloc work. In 1976 the Army's Missile Intelligence Agency asked about replicating Soviet psychokinesis experiments, and in August 1977 it gave SRI an $80,000 one-year contract. Another Army agency, the Materiel Systems Analysis Activity, investigated remote viewing with SRI through fiscal 1980, until a March 1980 order from William J. Perry cut research money for the program.
Fort Meade tried Monroe first, then turned to SRI
In 1978 an Army intelligence group at Fort Meade chose the Monroe Institute to teach its people out-of-body experience, a project called Gondola Wish. Before contacting Monroe it checked with DIA, which asked SRI about him. SRI said it had not evaluated his technique, that their research was remote viewing rather than out-of-body work, and that Targ and Puthoff knew Monroe personally. By September 1978 the Gondola Wish concept was canceled, an Army memo noted that the Monroe Institute was not cleared, and the Army looked at training its people under an existing SRI contract instead.
SRI screened and tested the Army's viewers
McMoneagle was interviewed by Puthoff and Targ during recruitment and then sent to SRI for testing. Army selection papers say SRI supplied the traits the unit looked for: open-minded, adventurous, above-average intelligence, mature and stable, artistic, sensitive and able to let information flow in. SRI stressed that no definite profile had been established. In November 1983 the Army gave SRI a contract to develop a formal psychological screening profile for finding new viewers.
Ingo Swann's coordinate remote viewing
Atwater says his unit kept pressing SRI to have Swann train Army viewers the way he worked; Pat Price had by then been hired by the CIA. Paul Smith, a later recruit, says Swann was the primary instructor, working with Puthoff, and was known as a strict taskmaster. Army procedures from 1984 and 1985 describe coordinate remote viewing training as a contracted SRI service lasting 12 to 18 months, taught in stages that start with general site features, at SRI offices in Menlo Park, New York and Washington and later at Fort Meade.
Monroe's visit to the SRI lab
Atwater tells a story Puthoff told him. On a visit to SRI, Monroe was shown a random number generator whose output was plotted on a television screen. The device itself sat two floors down, buried in concrete, and the physicists hoped Monroe might go out of body and influence it, as Swann was said to have done. Monroe simply put his finger on the monitor and dragged the line upward. Atwater tells it as a joke about Monroe being a goal-oriented man.
In their own words
Quotes are checked word for word against the recordings and documents they come from. Bracketed words correct transcription errors; “…” marks an omission.
“Written by Dr. [Puthoff] and Russell Targ on a subject called remote viewing, and they were studying at Stanford Research Institute a phenomena of people's ability to describe locations that were distant from them in space, distant from them in time, by mental means alone. Now in esoteric terms we might call that clairvoyance, but they tried to put a different name on it.”
“Well, it actually started as a result of some earlier things that were done at SRI International. There was some work done in the early '70s, 1972 timeframe, with a man, man by the name of Ingo Swann and another psychic by the name of Pat Price. This was … worked on under the … auspices of the CIA. As a result of some of the targeting that they did, they, they were very impressed by the fact that so much information could be produced on areas deep within the then Soviet Union, or on classified facilities that we in fact control.”
“At Stanford Research Institute, Russell Targ would interview a prospective remote viewer. They would sit in a room with paper and pencil, and at a designated time, for example, 10 o'clock in the morning, they were to describe the hidden location of where Dr. [Puthoff] had gone. There was a series of randomly assigned locations, and Dr. [Puthoff] would go that morning to one of these unknown but randomly assigned locations.”
“We were pestering SRI because we knew [Ingo Swann] was really good, and we'd seen lots of good things he did. Pat Price had been hired by the CIA at that time and wasn't under the purview of SRI anymore, but [Ingo] was there, and so we kept saying, won't [Ingo] train the way he does?”
“So, inherent in his contract is: Ingo Swann was going to do the training, in, in conjunction with Hal Puthoff and some of the other folks at SRI, but Ingo was the primary instructor. And so I heard all kinds of stories once I joined the program, which was in … Yeah, they started talking about Ingo Swann and, and what a strict taskmaster he was, and he didn't put up with nonsense.”
“Then you know about all the work done at Stanford Research Institute about remote viewing stuff. Yep. So I don't need to describe that. I don't need to take that again, that right now. Just as we don't like the term astral projection, when they develop[ed] this system, they did not like to call it clairvoyance, in the old term, because that again had the wrong connotation. So they call it remote viewing.”
“We were lucky enough to have as a consultant one of the world's leading remote viewers, who had worked for many years with SRI. And one of the things we wanted to find out was, one, would the [Hemi-Sync] process enhance the ability of [a] remote viewer? The second thing was, what would be the difference between remote viewing, or going out of body and going to a location?”
“And so, so they're trying to think, oh, maybe Bob Monroe can go out of body and go down there and mess with it, because that's what Ingo Swann did. But Bob didn't have an intellectual grasp of how do you generate random numbers and everything. He just put his finger on [the] TV monitor and drag[ged] the line up like that.”
Important things to consider
SRI is not Stanford University
The Stanford Research Institute was an independent research institute that had separated from Stanford University; it is now SRI International. Army papers use both names. When podcasts say remote viewing was studied "at Stanford," they mean SRI. Stanford University itself appears in this story only incidentally, for example through the sleep lab McMoneagle says was used for dream-state experiments.
Research began in 1972, operations in 1978
The dates people quote depend on what they are counting. SRI's research with Swann began in 1972. Army interest in Soviet work is dated to the same year. McMoneagle says the military's own intelligence-collection program did not start until October 1978, which matches the month Army papers say the intelligence staff tasked INSCOM to set up a remote-viewing program.
Remote viewing is not an out-of-body experience
The Army drew this line in 1978. Its Gondola Wish assessment defines an out-of-body experience as one in which a person's center of consciousness seems to be somewhere other than the body, and says this differs from what SRI calls remote viewing. Monroe made the same distinction to his Gateway groups, calling remote viewing an altered state, a kind of active meditation, rather than an out-of-body state.
The early experiments drew criticism
SRI's early work was challenged by skeptics, and even the critical reviewer of the 1995 government evaluation, Ray Hyman, framed later experiments as having avoided the flaws of the early SRI work. The striking results in Army briefings were reported by the program itself. Treat the early claims as the record of what impressed the sponsors, and the later evaluation as the outside judgment.
The CIA connection was an open secret
Atwater says it was an open secret that SRI's remote viewing work was funded by the CIA, and Army briefings say the CIA later pulled back from active work for political reasons while keeping its interest. The CIA's own public account dates its research to 1972 and its handoff to the Defense Intelligence Agency to 1977.
Later stories are not the SRI record
Popular retellings mix SRI's laboratory work with much later claims, such as Ingo Swann's account in his own later writing of viewing beings on the moon. Those stories come from individual books and interviews, not from SRI's published experiments or the Army papers. Read them as part of each viewer's story.
Monroe's link was personal, not institutional
Nothing in these sources makes SRI and the Monroe Institute partners. The connection runs through people: Targ and Puthoff knew Monroe, Monroe visited SRI, Army viewers trained at SRI and attended Monroe's programs, and Atwater later moved from the Army unit to the Institute. Monroe's own aim was out-of-body exploration, which SRI did not study.
Common questions
Who invented remote viewing?
The term and the laboratory method came from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California in the early 1970s. The laser physicist Hal Puthoff began experiments with the artist and psychic Ingo Swann in 1972, and fellow physicist Russell Targ joined him; another gifted subject, Pat Price, also worked with them. They called it remote viewing rather than clairvoyance to keep the work neutral and scientific in tone. Swann went on to develop the structured method later taught to Army viewers as coordinate remote viewing. The underlying idea of perceiving distant places is much older, but SRI gave it its modern name, protocols and government funding.
What did the SRI remote viewing experiments involve?
The best-known design was the outbounder experiment. One researcher, often Puthoff, drove to a location chosen at random from a pool of possible sites. Back at the lab, the viewer sat with an interviewer, often Targ, who also did not know the site. At an agreed time the viewer described and sketched where the outbounder was. Afterward an independent judge compared the description with the real site and five other randomly chosen sites to see whether it fit the true target best. Joe McMoneagle went through six such trials when the Army sent him to SRI. SRI also tested psychokinesis, for example with random number generators.
What was SRI's role in Project Stargate?
SRI was the program's laboratory partner. It developed remote viewing in the early 1970s with CIA funding, and Army research agencies contracted it in the late 1970s. When the Army set up its own unit at Fort Meade in 1978, SRI's Puthoff and Targ interviewed the recruits, SRI tested them with outbounder trials, and SRI supplied the personal traits used to select viewers. From the early 1980s SRI trained Army viewers under contract in Ingo Swann's coordinate remote viewing, a 12- to 18-month staged course. Paul Smith says Swann was the primary instructor. SRI later developed a screening profile for the Army, and McMoneagle worked with SRI's lab after he retired from the Army.
Did the CIA fund remote viewing at SRI?
Yes, according to the participants and the government's own accounts. McMoneagle says the early 1970s work with Ingo Swann and Pat Price was done under CIA auspices, and that the CIA was impressed by how much information the viewers produced on sites deep in the Soviet Union. Skip Atwater calls the CIA funding of SRI an open secret. A 1983 Army briefing says the CIA later stepped back from active work for political reasons but stayed interested. The CIA's public history dates its research to 1972 and its handoff to the Defense Intelligence Agency to 1977.
How is SRI connected to Robert Monroe and the Monroe Institute?
Through people rather than a formal partnership. Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff knew Monroe personally, and Skip Atwater recalls a photograph of Monroe at SRI with Pat Price and Targ, along with Puthoff's story of Monroe dragging a random number generator's plot up a screen with his finger. In 1978, before the Army planned out-of-body training with Monroe, DIA asked SRI about him; SRI said it studied remote viewing, not out-of-body experience. In the early 1980s a remote viewer who had worked with SRI consulted in Monroe's lab to test whether Hemi-Sync helped remote viewing and how it differed from going out of body.
Is remote viewing the same as astral projection or an out-of-body experience?
No, by the definitions used at the time. SRI defined remote viewing as acquiring information about a distant or hidden target by mental means. The Army's 1978 Gondola Wish assessment says an out-of-body experience, in which a person's center of consciousness seems to be somewhere other than the body, differs from what SRI calls remote viewing. Monroe told his Gateway groups that SRI avoided the word clairvoyance for the same reason he avoided astral projection, and he described remote viewing as an altered state, closer to active meditation, rather than leaving the body.
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