(someone who perceives or “receives” an extrasensory influence or impression) attempts to describe a geographically distinct target, which can be either a place or an object.

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            One of Puthoff’s and Targ’s first experiments involved percipient and former police officer Pat Price. After reading an article about the SRI’s remote viewing work, Price reached out the Puthoff­. Over the phone, Price described how he’d used extrasensory perception to reinforce much of his police work; Puthoff decided to bring him into the lab. 

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            Price was involved in two types of experiments. In one experiment, a researcher would sit in a closed-off room and draw something which Price, in a separate room, was meant to replicate. In the other experiment, Price would be given coordinates and asked to describe the geography of the given location, including both animate and inanimate details. Through these coordinate-centric trials, Price was able to produce incredibly accurate information; the odds of producing such information by chance were one in 100,000.

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            After a few more experiments with a few more percipients, the CIA wanted in. In 1973, the SRI and CIA kicked-off a twenty-four-year-long research program dedicated to the exploration of remote viewing. (There is evidence that the CIA’s interest in remote viewing centered around the phenomena’s potential in counterintelligence and espionage.)

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            In 1975, another percipient, Hella Hammid, began her lasting relationship with the SRI. She was a well-known fine arts photographer and a friend of Targ’s–initially, Hammid became involved as an experimental control. But, it turned out that Hammid had abilities mirroring those of Pat Price­–she was able to accurately perceive a location (through multiple senses) when granted its coordinates. Hammid’s ability carried across multiple experimental trials. Through these trials, she was able to produce information so accurate and with such frequency that the odds of doing so by chance were only two in a million.

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            Now, not all humans possess abilities quite like Pat Price and Hella Hammid (which makes sense in the context of J.B. Rhines work). Stephan Schwartz–a California-based professor, researcher, and prolific writer whose work centers around the exploration of extraordinary human functioning–describes psychic phenomena as existing on a bell curve: poorly gifted individuals at one tail, exceptionally gifted individuals at the other tail, and the majority of the population in the middle. This is why controls–for instance, placebos–don’t necessarily work in psi-centric experiments: There is never a complete absence of ability. 

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            I’ll use the typical drug efficacy example to explain the importance of placebos: In a drug efficacy experiment, you give some subjects the drug of interest, and you give other subjects a placebo; none of the subjects know which they are receiving. If a subject is given a placebo, there should be no improvement in their condition as compared to subjects who are given the drug of interest. If there is no significant difference in physiological response to the drug versus the placebo, then you assume the drug is not functional in the way you hoped it might be. 

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            In the case of experiments pertaining to psi phenomena, there is no placebo to offer (if we are to believe Stephan Schwartz). We can take Hella Hammid as an example–she was initially brought into the SRI as a control, but later showed an astonishing ability to view targets remotely. So controls equivalent to a placebo are very difficult to imagine and to create in the world of parapsychology. But this is the case for many experiments pertaining to low-effect phenomena (for example, the detection of Higgs boson particles in physics). If we take the existing body of science seriously–within which exist validated studies that lack placebo controls–then we ought to take remote viewing seriously. We shouldn’t immediately discount it as “junk science” because the studies pertaining to it meet scientific standards a bit differently. 

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            Now let’s return to our discussion of SRI-based research: What might a simple, non-CIA-centric remote viewing protocol look like? Can the protocol hold up to scientific standards? 

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            For their experiments, Puthoff and Targ commissioned an outside source (not directly involved in the research) to create a pool of over 100 sites within a thirty-minute, round-trip driving distance from the lab. Both the viewer and the researchers involved in each experimental trial were blind to the target pool, meaning they had no idea what sites existed to be chosen from. 

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            Each trial required three participants: an “outbounder,” a viewer, and a recorder. During each trial, the “outbounder” would leave the SRI and drive to a randomly selected site where he or she would stay for fifteen minutes. The other two participants would remain at the SRI where, for the duration of these fifteen minutes, the recorder would take down the viewer’s perceptions. 

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            After forty-five minutes (thirty minutes of round-trip driving, fifteen minutes of perceiving), three judges would be brought in to rank a set of five sites, one of which was the site that the “outbounder” had driven to. The ranking depended on how much each site in the set of five resembled the viewer’s recorded description. The judges were also blind to the target pool, and each judge ranked their target set independently of the other judges.