CIA Scientific Study On Psychic Abilities
This blog post is a response to a reel of mine going viral, briefly touching on studies that have been done and are being done on psychic abilities. So many of you asked me for the PDF’s and links, so I thought I would put it all into a blog post for you. I have added the links at the bottom of the post for you to indulge yourself in further studies.
Firstly, I do want to just add that I find it very interesting that the US government has been sponsoring psychic functioning research (a secret project that used the codeword project “STARGATE”) since 1970, during the cold war. They spent $20 million since finding out that the Soviets were studying psychic abilities. My question would be, if they weren’t convinced that it was real, why did they spend so much money on it over the long period of 23 years?
CIA PAPER 1: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE EVIDENCE FOR PSYCHIC FUNCTIONING, Professor Jessica Utts, Division of Statistics University of California, Davis.
“Research on psychic functioning, conducted over a two decade period, is examined to determine whether or not the phenomenon has been scientifically established. A secondary question is whether or not it is useful for government purposes.”
Reading this pdf, it is clear that the author is pretty convinced that psychic abilities are real after this 23 year exploration. “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established.”
“The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance.”
The kinds of psychic abilities that are studied in this experiment include
Extrasensory perception (ESP), in which one acquires information through unexplainable means; referred to as anomalous cognition (AC), including precognition and clairvoyance.
And psychokinesis, in which one physically manipulates the environment through unknown means; referred to as anomalous perturbation (AP).
”The vast majority of anomalous cognition experiments at both SRI and SAIC used a technique known as remote viewing. In these experiments, a viewer attempts to draw or describe (or both) a target location, photograph, object or short video segment. All known channels for receiving the information are blocked.”
This next quote is someone’s observation of the study, linking it to ancient spiritual texts, which I just thought was very fascinating and might do another blog post on.
“Russel Targ has commented that the techniques used by the US viewers for ‘looking into the distance and the future’ are ‘strikingly similar to the detailed instructions given in the Yoga Sutra!’”
The CIA published on their website that “enough accurate remote viewing experiences existed to defy randomness, but the phenomenon was too unreliable to be useful for intellectual purposes.” Here, it’s interesting to note that they never said it was false, but rather that it was too risky and unreliable for them to use.
The 5–15% accuracy figure reflects an average across all participants. Some people showed virtually no accuracy, while others - like Pat Price - were said to produce details aligning closely with classified satellite imagery. When everyone’s results are combined, the weaker performances pull the average down, masking how accurate the top performers may have been. Quite obviously, any skill that can be developed would have experienced and inexperienced people using that skill. The research paper talks about this from early research findings, comparing the skill level and accuracy to sports players - also pointing out that even extremely talented sports players don’t hit the goal every single shot.
In the paper, it’s mentioned that there was a lot of criticism from others about methodological flaws. There are multiple times where the study is tweaked and improved to keep researching. Its stated that this criticism does not hold the necessary weight to disprove the research findings, “Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted.” Because of how the statistics match other studies done around the world, “Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.”
She writes that her findings prove psychic abilities work well,
“Precognition, in which the answer is known to no one until a future time, appears to work quite well.”
By May (1995), there were two non laboratory remote viewer examples where “the results were so striking that they far exceed the phenomenon as observed in the laboratory.”
“In Section 3 an example is given in which a remote viewer allegedly gave codewords from a secret facility that he should not have even known existed.”
“One of the apparent successes concerned the “West Virginia Site” in which two remote viewers purportedly identified an underground secret facility. One of them apparently named codewords and personnel in this facility accurately enough that it set off a security investigation to determine how that information could have been leaked.
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“The same viewer then claimed that he could describe a similar Communist Bloc site and proceeded to do so for a site in the Urals. According to Puthoff and Targ "the two reports for the West Virginia Site, and the report for the Urals Site were verified by personnel in the sponsor organization as being substantially correct (p. 8)."
The paper notes that “the evaluation of operational work remains difficult, in part because there is no chance baseline for comparison (as there is in controlled experiments) and in part because of differing expectations of different evaluators.” This is the grounds which I think a lot of people stand on when they discount and devalue the study’s findings.
The research came into light, being declassified in 1995 as the Cold War ended. To end the paper, it says, “Even if we were all to agree that anomalous cognition is possible, there remains the question of whether or not it would have any practical use for government purposes.” This is because the results were not as accurate as they would have liked it to be for such high risk government situations, not because there wasn’t any evidence that the abilities weren’t true.
“There is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data.”
Utts is determined that the studies results are consistent enough to provide evidence, however Hyman did not think that the evidence is enough. He says that “the results of the SAIC experiments combined with other contemporary findings offer hope that the parapsychologists may be getting closer to the day when they can put something before the scientific community and challenge it to provide an explanation.”
The paper can be found here - https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00791R000200070001-9.pdf
Books published by people associated with the STARGATE program;
H.E.Puthoff & R.Targ, Mind-Reach 1977, Delacorte, New York (1977)
Ingo Swann, Natural ESP, 1987, Bantum, New York (1987)
Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe, 1997, Harper Edge Publishers (1997)
Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies, 1997, Dell Books, New York
Russell Targ & Jane Katra, Miracles of Mind: Exploring Non-Local Consciousness, 1999, New Word Library
Joe McMoneagle, “Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook” (May 2000)
INDEPENDENT STUDY: FOLLOW-UP ON THE U.S. CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY’S (CIA) REMOTE VIEWING EXPERIMENTS, published in 2023 in Brain and Behavior, conducted by a team of researchers - Álex Escolà-Gascón (lead author)
They set out to statistically reproduce the results from the original study, while examining the cognitive mental processing behind remote viewing; studying emotional intelligence (non-logical, sensitivity to internal signals, sensitivity to reading energy, and non analytical, intuitive awareness) as well as intuitive information processing (quick, instinctive, based on patterns and impressions).
“We measured emotional intelligence with the Mayer—Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test. A total of 347 participants who were nonbelievers in psychic experiences completed an RV experiment using targets based on location coordinates. A total of 287 participants reported beliefs in psychic experiences and completed another RV experiment using targets based on images of places.”
“The results of our first group analysis were nonsignificant, but the analysis applied to the second group produced significant RV‐related effects corresponding to the positive influence of EI.” In their conclusion, they state that “
“These findings have profound implications for a new hypothesis of anomalous cognitions relative to RV protocols. Emotions perceived during RV sessions may play an important role in the production of anomalous cognitions.”
This updated report on RV allow them to state the following:
RV experiments conducted under controlled conditions - and without attributing results to explanations like post-mortem consciousness (theories around consciousness surviving death) - still tend to produce above-chance outcomes.
Outperforming chance doesn’t necessarily prove that RV is real in a concrete, empirical sense. Instead, it points to a consistent statistical anomaly - something unusual that may suggest anomalous cognition could exist, even if it’s not fully understood.
The findings also show that EI skills related to perceiving and interpreting emotional cues (PIC), can predict between about 9% and 19.5% of performance in RV tasks. This suggests that emotional processes might play a role in triggering or shaping these anomalous cognitive experiences.
Overall, anomalous cognition should be treated as something that is supported statistically, but not yet confirmed as a real, physical phenomenon - mainly because there’s still no clear causal mechanism explaining how it would work.
Their results prove that the statistics support anomalous cognition (gathering information about something without using the normal 5 senses or logical thinking and memory). Their problem is that it is still not proven HOW this is done. This is quite disheartening conclusion to make as science might take a long time to be able to prove how psychic abilities occur, which means most scientists will keep turning away from acknowledging it. Below are further links to look into and figure out what it is that you truly believe.
The link to this paper is found here, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10275521/
Some links to research that has been done and is being done that is related to my reel:
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2010/12/study-looks-brains-ability-see-future
https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/psychic-spying-research-produces-credible-evidence
https://noetic.org/blog/columbia-university-psychic-abilities/
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/our-research/neuroimaging-studies-of-psi/
(If some things look a little different to the screenshots on the new reel I posted about this blog post, it’s because my webpage crashed after publishing the blog and I had to retype it all.)