Petra, I’m starting to get the very unpleasant feeling that you’re only here to recruit for your own message board and the HRVG website, not really to discuss remote viewing and David’s Staff Report. For a supposed enthusiast, you seem awfully reluctant to step up to the podium and preach. We don’t want to talk to your guild president–we want to talk to you. You were the one who came in here and said David’s Staff Report was “a wee bit critical”. If you want him to withdraw his criticisms, you’re going to have to show him (and us) that remote viewing is true, not fob us off with directions to your BBS. Do you want a “dialogue”, or are you just looking for new people for your BBS?
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board, Petra. This is a website devoted to Fighting Ignorance, as you may have noticed from the Home Page. So, practically this entire message board is composed of people who are deeply skeptical about just such things as remote viewing. It is extremely unlikely that any of us would be interested in going to your RV message board and listening to the Gospel According to Remote Viewing, because we were converts to the Church of St. Cecil long ago. Sorry.
What we go by is “proof”, “evidence”, and by that I mean the word “evidence” as used by the scientific community. A lab experiment has to be what scientists call “reproducible”. The scientist publishes what he did to get his particular results, and then all the other scientists go out and try it. If they can get it to work, then it’s said to be “reproducible” and it enters the scientific literature as fact.
This is the sort of thing we’re looking for, here at the SDMB–remote viewing has to be reproducible. Twenty people have to look at the same number and come up with the same mental image of the same object. If you can’t produce this kind of results, then it’s not “proved”, for us. It’s as simple as that.
I would be very interested in seeing the results of the RV experience that convinced you RV was real.
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The world is full of serious scientists and mathematicians who nevertheless believe in things like UFOs, crop circles, spores from space, and, yes, remote viewing.
Show us what your “proof” was that you weren’t making it up, that it wasn’t coincidence. What we require to be convinced is evidence that 19 other people looked at the same number and saw the same object. All that verbiage about “protocols” and “targets” and “congruent characteristics” sounds to me like a lot of window dressing. The linked page that purported to show the results of someone remote viewing the sinking of the Titanic didn’t say, “Now, if you interpret the characteristics one way, this person may have seen the sinking of the Titanic”, it said, flat-out, “This person remote viewed the sinking of the Titanic”.
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Okay, so what were the pictures and adjectives that would have added up to “sinking the Titanic”? Also, what pops into my head immediately is the strong possibility of coaching by a teacher. In order to convince us that remote viewing was real, you would have to produce 20 people who went into individual cubicles, isolated from each other, who looked at the same number and who came up with virtually identical drawings and lists of adjectives. I mean, how many possible adjectives are there for the sinking of the Titanic?
So you’re saying at the higher protocols, you have a coach or teacher standing there, “guiding” you? You don’t think that could make for a little bias in interpreting the raw data?
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Here at the Straight Dope, we’re not much interested in “anecdotal evidence”, as noted above.
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Um, when a scientist does a lab experiment, he doesn’t get a committee together to discuss his test results, and they throw out “single bits of information” and only go with what everybody agrees the results were. They keep all the bits of information, although they sometimes disagree fiercely on what the experiment proved, and that in itself is frequently a published “result”, the fact that people can’t agree on what it proves. They don’t try to build a consensus on what the results were, they just publish the results and let the rest of the scientific community work with the raw data. So where’s some raw data for remote viewing?
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Well, yeah, I suppose that if you keep at it long enough, and have enough meetings to throw out single bits of information, you can get to where finally everybody in the group can see the sinking of the Titanic.
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Okay, show us where someone actually accomplished this, or something similar.
And why the emphasis on “adjectives”? Why no nouns or verbs? When children learn to speak, they learn nouns first–“cup”, “cookie”, “dog”. Then they progress to verbs by age 2–“give cup”, “eat cookie”, “pat dog”. The concept of adjectives (big/little, tall/short, color words) is a fairly sophisticated one, grasped by 3-year-olds–“give big cup”, “eat good cookie”, “pat black doggie”. Why wouldn’t remote viewing go with the simplest concept and ask for nouns? Look at 1278 and see “dolphin” instead of “wet, gray, smooth, curvy”?
I’d suggest that this is because it’s easier to fit adjectives around an object. “Tall thin hard” could mean anything, from the Eiffel Tower to the Washington Monument to the Nelson Monument in Trafalgar Square. Or it could mean a life-size concrete statue of Abraham Lincoln. But “tall thin hard tower” pretty much eliminates Honest Abe done in cement.
Also, I’d be interested to know how many remote viewers are blind. The adjectives that are required for a remote viewing are very selective and are mainly dealing with how the object looks, because you’re trying to draw a picture of how it looks and come up with a list of adjectives for how it looks.
And, how do you draw a picture of “wet” or “gray”?
I’ve no idea what JREF is …JREF - Ohmigawd - and I’m in the military, I’ve no excuse for not being able to break out an acronym.
My only excuse is, it was real late at night, after a long day at work … my brain was so fried. I didn’t figure it out until I woke up this morning. I thought JREF was some kind of obscure methodological research protocol … hahahahaha. (sigh)
DDGoose - How else am I supposed to state that I don’t feel qualified to answer your questions, based on my limited experience and lack of research? In what other way am I to describe my misunderstanding of what the response would be to my original post? I refer you to the HRVG BBS because the people there can answer your questions far better than I can - if that sounds like recruiting, so be it.
testimonial follows Glenn publishes the website stats every month on the BBS. The website receives hundreds of thousands of unique hits every month. It is THE forum to learn about and discuss remote viewing.
I will NOT respond to further posts on this thread. Any further attempt by me to answer questions would be a parade of my ignorance. I stated that last time, in slightly less self-deprecating language.
Good luck, folks, in your search for the truth. Happy hunting.
Here’s the problem I have with your protocol. Suppose that RV works as you say it does. And you are able to come up with adjectives that describe the target at a rate greater than chance.
Now, given all that, what good is it? From an intelligence gathering standpoint? Suppose you get “wet, gray, curvy, smooth” for your target. Well, that is nice. But…what is the target? There are a potential infinity of objects that possess those adjectives. Sure, you’ve narrowed things down to a smaller order of infinities than before, but what have you really done?
In order for remote viewing to be of any value, it has to give you information that you didn’t have before. If you are unable to recognize the information that remote viewing gave you until AFTER you already have the answer, then you really didn’t get any information after all.
Example. Suppose I ask “Where is the terrorist hiding?” And I get the answer “soft, dry, red, textured”. How does that help? I haven’t really narrowed down the search, since there are millions of locations that might potentially have those characteristics.
In fact…I would go so far as to say that it might be a rare location that doesn’t–in some way or in some form–possess those characteristics, or some of those characteristics, or closely related characteristics.
In order for us to determine that remote viewing gave us information about the location, we’d have to do something different than simply try to figure out ways for the adjectives to match the location after we already know the location. We’d have to have some way of objectively scoring the matches.
One way to do that would be to take a series of photographs. A panel could list a set of, say, 20 adjectives that apply to each photograph. Then we could compile a list of all the adjectives used to describe all the photographs, and give the RV candidates the list. We’d ask them to match adjectives to photograph ID numbers. And if they got scores better than chance, we might decide that something interesting was happening.
But even if it was, what would we have gained? Not much, since a list of adjectives is pretty much useless information.
<< But even if it was, what would we have gained? Not much, since a list of adjectives is pretty much useless information. >>
Granted. But, IF we had proof that we could get those kind of “hits”, that would generate the funds for future study – are there people who can send/receive more precisely?
Oh, Lord, here I am defending the Remote Viewing! :: smacks self in forehead :: No, what I’m defending is the scientific approach. If we found scientific proof that some sort of telepathy did exist, we could focus (ahem) efforts at quantifying it and trying to find practical applications.
I, for one, would be thoroughly bummed if the current tele-marketers were replaced with telepathic-marketers.
Hello,
I am a member of the Hawaii Remote Viewers’ Guild and wanted to say a few words. First, I don’t think Petra was trying to recruit more people for our Guild. We are a nonprofit org dedicated to the study of remote viewing and its anomalies. We view targets of mutual interest to us and periodically will work a client target.
I do invite you to look at the sessions posted on our site. I wrote an article on the World Trade Center incident and how our “corrupted” data appeared. The target we worked that Monday prior to the disaster was a simple validation target…one that we work for practice and to hone our skills.
Remote viewing is not a pop-up microwave skill one can learn overnight or in a week. It is not for everyone, nor should everyone try it. It takes months to become a remote viewer and for some, years to become a good viewer. It is a communication skill between our primary and sub awareness and the data fed to us from the sub is subjective as one of you aptly stated; however, subjective because it communicates to us (not the public) the symbology required for interpretation (or misinterpretation as we have been known to do) of data sent to the primary awareness. One of our top viewers is a Swedish young man who came to our Guild as a total skeptic. We did not try to persuade him that remote viewing works. He tried it himself and came out convinced it works.
I have just completed a sequel to that first article (minus the little typos my editor had inadvertently put in) with more data and some other interesting anomalies. It should be going up this week.
Remote viewing is often mistaken for something akin to psychic readings. It is not. It is a process that is protocol driven. To identify one protocol here for you to try would not help you to attain the understanding you would need regarding rv.
Most of our significant sessions are concluded with analysis. Analysis separates the wheat from the chaff in our methodology. It is a tedious process that can take months, much like forensic research. Hence, it is not very popular with our pop 'n serve culture.
Dick published a remote viewing of target PCPK-BJGJ on 8/22 and feedback came on 9/4.
Sita published a remote viewing of target FUGI-OVVI on 8/26 and feedback came on 9/3.
Sita published a remote viewing of target LORE-IMTC on 8/27 and feedback came on 9/5.
Dick published a remote viewing of target KGWM-LRHT on 9/1 and feedback came on 9/11.
Sita published a remote viewing oftarget MRSV-QRJA on 9/4 and feedback came on 9/11.
Dick published a remote viewing of target FVCQ-HPFQ on 9/11 and feedback came on 9/18.
So, the links are all to various photographs. Where’s the feedback? Where are the lists of adjectives? Where are the drawings? That’s the “raw data” I’m talking about.
And the “Monday prior to the disaster” would have been either September 10 or September 3. So do you mean Sita’s FUGI-OVVI target?
We don’t really care how long it takes to learn to do it. All we’re interested in is whether it’s real. We need to see scientific evidence of that, not anecdotal evidence, such as, “We have this Swedish guy who came to us a total skeptic, and now he’s a true believer…”
I learned my message board manners on the HRVG BBS. Glenn does not tolerate insulting posts, and has removed many by people who were far more interested in flaming RV or even particular individuals than in having a rational discussion about RV. Guild members love answering questions about RV on the BBS; it’s a great way to address specific concerns.
Neither I nor Kahealani are trying to “recruit” anyone. The web site is an open site - you don’t have to register to look at it, and the same goes for the BBS. No registration, no sending ANYONE your e-mail address, let alone your money … you can post as many times as you like, with different aliases, even, although I would imagine Glenn would call you on all the aliases after a while (he’s done that before too).
I will be responding soon to the additional posts. Most of you have been pretty polite, and I’d like to return the courtesy and keep trying to answer your questions. Thank you for your interest, and I hope I can address your questions adequately.
I do remote viewing all the time. When I read Lord of the Rings, I remote viewed Middle Earth with characters and actions.
When I watch a Cameron Diaz movie, I remote view right through her wardrobe. And then I read her mind, and you know what, wherever she is when I’m doing this, she is fantasizing about me! (And it’s really cool, except the part about viewing me. I’m not a pretty sight.)
Lemur86 said: Now, given all that, what good is it? From an intelligence gathering standpoint? Suppose you get “wet, gray, curvy, smooth” for your target. Well, that is nice. But…what is the target? There are a potential infinity of objects that possess those adjectives. Sure, you’ve narrowed things down to a smaller order of infinities than before, but what have you really done?
In order for remote viewing to be of any value, it has to give you information that you didn’t have before. If you are unable to recognize the information that remote viewing gave you until AFTER you already have the answer, then you really didn’t get any information after all.
Remote viewing as an intelligence collection tool doesn’t rely on just one viewer or just one session, or just a few adjectives. If a session produces intriguing data, then the intriguing data is cued as a new target and the viewers get new data. Experienced viewers, multiple sessions, and extensive analysis can produce data that is exceptionally detailed, previously unknown, and unavailable to collection by any other means. Having said THAT, I must state that RV shouldn’t be used as the only source of intelligence … it should be part of a collection effort using multiple types of collection. That is true for all intelligence collection methods, not just RV.
Also having said that, realize that this is a very new thing. Humans have had intuitive abilities presumably for eons, just like other animals (how does your dog know you’re taking him to the vet when he doesn’t even understand English?!). This ability of the subconscious to communicate with the conscious mind has never really been taxed beyond providing very basic information - danger, food, shelter, highly symbolic dreams, etc. We have only just started exploring and developing this ability of the mind. It’s going to take A LOT of work and A LOT of research and probably at least decades, to refine it to a highly detailed, significant level.
While I understand everyone’s skepticism concerning how a few adjectives can fit a potential infinity of objects, I have to say, you are looking at the whole issue a bit backwards. A viewer isn’t starting out with a potential infinity of targets. A viewer is given ONE target. With the HRVG protocols, the viewer works through several protocols producing well over a dozen pages of data on this one target. The viewer collects sensory data for all five senses, either by writing down words or drawing pictures. The later alert state protocols are even free-form enough that the viewer can attempt to get emotional impressions, although the viewer is also free to write down those impressions at any point in the sessions as he/she perceives them (again, within protocol). The later theta-state protocols are “whole hog” for lack of a better term … the viewer attempts to experience full non-local awareness of the target, i.e., experience the target as if the viewer was physically there. These theta-state protocols are guided by a second individual to keep the viewer on target, and also to keep the viewer from falling asleep. The theta state is the “place between asleep and awake” and it is very, very easy to go off-target and into la-la land without someone there to keep the viewer focused. NEITHER the viewer OR the guide know what the target is. The ONLY information they have about the target is the target ID. So how does the guide know where to guide the viewer? Experienced viewers, over time, develop a good “feel” for target data. The viewer and the guide work together, following that “feeling”. On good days, they nail the target and produce exceptional data. On bad days, they end up in the RV equivalent of Disneyland. None of us has figured out yet why viewers cycle in and out of good ability to remote view … another great subject for research. Personally, I think it is some sort of rest/wake cycle of cognitive function that we’re not even aware of yet, although the period of the cycle seems to be a few weeks instead of a few hours like the circadian rhythm … anyway…
Lemur86 also said: In order for us to determine that remote viewing gave us information about the location, we’d have to do something different than simply try to figure out ways for the adjectives to match the location after we already know the location. We’d have to have some way of objectively scoring the matches.
There is a specific protocol for finding locations. It involves using lines of bearing from at least three locations to get a fix on a location. The viewer doesn’t know those reference locations when shooting the lines of bearing. All the viewer is given is a set of numbers that are IDs for geographical locations (usually cities).
CK Dexter Haven said: … IF we had proof that we could get those kind of “hits”, that would generate the funds for future study – are there people who can send/receive more precisely?
Oh, Lord, here I am defending the Remote Viewing! :: smacks self in forehead :: No, what I’m defending is the scientific approach. If we found scientific proof that some sort of telepathy did exist, we could focus (ahem) efforts at quantifying it and trying to find practical applications.
Remote viewing is an attempt to quantify “telepathic” ability by forcing the subconscious to use protocols to express its impressions. The HRVG protocols lend themselves very well to the scientific approach because the protocols are very strict. Target IDs are random sets of letters and/or numbers that have no deliberate relationship to the targets (other than the targeteering process) … viewers view their targets double blind … and HRVG maintains a strict chain of custody on targets and viewer sessions. We DO have proof that we can get the kind of “hits” you mentioned. But personally, I don’t expect a good scientist to be anything other than intrigued by what we’ve done so far. Working with a good scientist, we could set up double blind viewing and protocols and all that other stuff to satisfy the scientific method and produce reproducible results. No one in HRVG is the least bit concerned about a scientific approach invalidating RV because we already adhere to the scientific approach within the guild with the methods I mentioned above. The challenge is, finding a scientist with the credentials, expertise, interest, and funding to do the research. That scientist will have at least a couple dozen guinea pigs available for those experiments amongst the members of HRVG.
Yes, there are people who can send/receive very precisely. But you know what? We don’t want to use those kind of people to prove that RV works, although they certainly can produce amazing results. We like to teach ordinary people how to remote view, to prove that this is an innate talent in ALL people that can be developed in ANYONE that has an interest. That doesn’t mean that just anyone can become a great viewer, just as not anyone can become a piano virtuoso with years and years of practice. Even the least “intuitive” person can become a pretty good remote viewer, though, with persistence. Did I waffle enough for you in this paragraph? Remote viewing is an innate ability like any other, and its development and expression are dependent upon the talent an individual already has, and the willingness an individual has to develop it.
Duck Duck Goose said: Here at the Straight Dope, we’re not much interested in “anecdotal evidence”, as noted above.
You’ve got to start the research somewhere. If we eliminated all research that started off with anecdotal evidence, we’d still be up in the trees eating bugs and berries.
Duck Duck Goose also said: Um, when a scientist does a lab experiment, he doesn’t get a committee together to discuss his test results, and they throw out “single bits of information” and only go with what everybody agrees the results were. They keep all the bits of information, although they sometimes disagree fiercely on what the experiment proved, and that in itself is frequently a published “result”, the fact that people can’t agree on what it proves. They don’t try to build a consensus on what the results were, they just publish the results and let the rest of the scientific community work with the raw data. So where’s some raw data for remote viewing?
Scientists throw out anomalous bits all the time, using that thingy called “statistical analysis.” Good scientists, though, note the anomalous bits when they publish their data. When HRVG does analysis on RV sessions, the anomalous bits (the bits that aren’t corroborated by two other similar or identical bits) are considered to be intrusions of the viewer’s imagination or personality and don’t make it through the analytical process. Since HRVG often posts whole sessions on the web site, though, those anomalous bits are there for anyone to see, anyway … they aren’t being hidden in an attempt to make RV look better.
Having several people view a target isn’t having “a committee get together to discuss test results” or “building a consensus.” Having several people view a target is a way of proving that the results ARE reproducible. It’s not reproducible if only one person does the viewing. A skeptic could look at one great session by one person and rightly say, it’s an anomaly. But if five or ten people do the same high quality work in multiple sessions, it’s not an anomaly … it’s a statistically significant result, worthy of further research.
Kahealani mentioned an article she wrote … to read the article, go to the HRVG website, and click on the “Migrations into the Future Present” link on the sidebar on the right side of the page.
Most of you have had questions that relate to specific protocols. At the website, click on the Library button, and then FAQ. The FAQ section contains a brief synopsis of the HRVG protocols, with pictures. Another link that specifically discusses the visual protocol is available by clicking on the Analysis button on the main page, and then the link, The Case for Visids.
To view an entire session, click on the Sessions button on the main page. The Sessions section lists many sessions, both the data and the target. I suggest you look at least two. For one, look at the target first, then the data. For another, look at the data first, and try to guess what the target is from the session before looking at the target.
To view an entire project, click on the Projects button on the main page. I personally recommend the Erminmink project. It’s the most heavily viewed section of the entire web site and has a really high “gee whiz” factor.
To view a prediction experiment, click on the Projects button, and then Prediction Experiment 1.
And I must recommend “On Target” the remote viewing news, accessible by clicking on the “On Target” button on the main page of the website. In particular, I recommend the articles “What Went Wrong” and “La Propagation Elegante.” These articles were written by guild members and discuss a lot of the mysteries and quandaries of remote viewing. These two articles are in the June/July issue, which should be the one you get linked to.
I wish I could put specific links here for all these pages, but they all exist within the HRVG website somehow and I’m not exactly a computer wizard to figure out how to put the links here. Navigating the website is pretty simple though, so hopefully not having the links here is not much of an inconvenience.
HRVG advertisement here HRVG is the only RV organization that posts full sessions on its website. Other websites often make claims but don’t post the sessions. Other organizations also often use only single sessions produced by single viewers and call that proof that remote viewing works … and then don’t post the session. HRVG posts the sessions that back up any claims we make, and the skeptic can decide for him/herself if the sessions back up the claim.
I’m pretty sure I’ve addressed all the questions everyone raised. If you have more questions, you could of course post them on this message board, but I personally won’t be available to answer them probably for a whole week. I am looking forward to a 60+ hour work week this week and I’ll be happy if I can just spell my name correctly in a few days, let alone answer any complicated questions. If I may, once again, refer you to the HRVG BBS, I can assure you that you will receive a thorough and relatively quick response to your questions if you post any there. You can access the BBS by clicking on the Bulletin Board button on the main page. At the very least, please read through the FAQ and look at a few sessions before posting any questions … it’ll make you look a lot smarter.
First, If you’ve got people that can send/recieve very precisely, bring them forward. This is exactly what we are asking for. First provide the good evidence that what you claim is real, then offer to teach it to others.
Second, while good research sometimes starts with anecdotal evidence, bad research always relies on it. Your compatriot offered supposed evidence of a hit involving the Word Trade Center, but he did this after the fact. This can only lead me to believe that he form-fitted the evidence to fit the event. I checked out your website, and true-believers evaluating the works of other true-believers can only end up one way. You are using nothing resembling a double-blind test.
Here’s a simple test. Take ten different “guesses” and the ten objects they were supposedly viewing. Have ten different people try to match the guesses to the hits independent of each other, and totally isolated from each other, and produce the results.
Irishman pointed out that it’s a problem when someone has to subjectively interpret the data. You answered that HRVG doesn’t interpret just one viewer, but always subjectively interprets several all together. This doesn’t really address his point, which is the biggest problem that I see with the research. You have all kinds of strict protocols, then go back and throw out data that doesn’t fit, and get to come up with subjective ways to make the rest of the data correlate.
There are good ways to measure this objectively. Have a viewer describe 20 pictures based on remote viewing, then afterwards, show him the pictures and ask him to put the correct numbers on each. Don’t allow coaching. Surely the person who remote viewed an object would be able to pick out the correct picture out of 20. If you can repeatedly match more than a two or three out of 20, that’s very good evidence for RV. You could then take this test to the Randi Foundation, repeat it, and claim your cool million bucks. I’m sure the HRVG could use this money, and think of how far it would go towards letting the whole world know that RV is real!
[note to all my Doper friends–if ya’ll have been sitting there “holding it”, you might wanna nip upstairs and take care of that little thing, before you start this. You know how Ducky is when she gets going…
Since you’re familiar with message board etiquette, you are no doubt aware that posting a smilie after an insult doesn’t magically make it NOT an insult. It just makes it an insult said with a smile.
Well, you know, I’ve been doing that this morning, having nothing else to do but sit here and wait for the furnace man and the telephone repairman, and I’ve been dead wrong every single time. I guess I do not have a career in remote viewing, huh? I’ve also been looking at sessions (see further down).
Right, but Science takes observation from anecdotal evidence as a starting point, and then goes out and sets up an experiment to test that anecdotal evidence. Science does not merely shrug and say, “Well, huh, you can remote view the sinking of the Titanic” and take it as fact. And I haven’t seen any RV research, either started or finished. All you’ve got so far is anecdotal evidence.
Okay, so, scientists publish their anomalous bits, too, when they publish their results, but when remote viewing publishes their results, it’s without the anomalous bits, which have been completely discarded. Once again, the difference between science and RV is made clear.
Okay, so what information about anything has RV ever given us? I’m discounting things like trips to alien planets. What information about, say, the sinking of the Titanic has RV given us?
I’ve been looking at some sessions (see below) and I don’t see where anybody has posted anything like, “Well, here are Dick’s ideograms, and here’s our train of thought showing which anomalous bits we discarded.” Obviously, some anomalous bits were discarded, because Dick’s ideograms don’t look anything like “Marines” to me. But nobody’s telling how ya’ll came to the conclusion that Dick remote viewed the Marines.
Similarly, in the WTC protocols (below), there’s nothing to indicate how anybody came to the conclusion that that’s what was being remote viewed.
Okay, so where is it?
The “scientific method” is not something that can only be carried out by card-carrying “Scientists”. Anybody at all can do it. Even fourth-graders are carrying out the Scientific Method when they set up those styrofoam cups planted with bean seeds and experiment to see which ones grow better, the ones on the bright windowsill or the ones on the dark counter.
The HRVG could do this experiment themselves, perfectly well, without needing a federal research grant or a gen-yoo-wine lab-coated Scientist.
Yes, but a group of people DO get together and discuss it, don’t they? And decide which anomalous bits to discard? That’s what you call the “analysis”.
It sounds to me like they come to a consensus as to what the ideograms and word lists mean. I’d like to see some information on how many times they look at ideograms and word lists and come up with the wrong answer. Say it’s supposed to be Timothy Leary with a box, and instead the “analysis” group says Dick, or whoever, must have remote viewed the sinking of the Titanic. And then they go look at the photo and it’s not the Titanic, it’s Timothy Leary with a box. What do they do then? Throw out the entire session, or just throw out the anomalous bits that don’t correspond to Timothy Leary with a box?
Okay, big question. At any time during the sessions, are you all also talking to each other? Are you saying things like, “I see a ladder” or “I see a man and a dog”? Or are these sessions carried out in total, rules-mandated silence and complete privacy? Also, I see references to “blackboard”, as in “Jimmy’s work in S4 Cascade”. Up at the top of his picture, it says “blackboard”. At certain times during sessions, are people drawing pictures on the blackboard for everyone in the group to see? This might explain two pictures of ladders, two pictures of dogs, two pictures of the circle/cross/X/smaller circles ideogram.
From the FAQ:
Are they taken to the blackboard so other people can see them and comment on them? Or is the viewer alone in a room with a blackboard?
Is the second viewer in these three instances someone who had already seen the ladder, the dog, or the circle/cross, and who was able to prompt the viewer, "Is it maybe a ladder you’re seeing?’
So what you’re saying is, these are two people who work together all the time, so they know how each other’s minds work? So they’d be able to make suggestions about what it is the viewer in theta state is possibly seeing?
A scientific approach to RV would be to give 20 people the same target ID, send them into separate cubicles, and see what they came up with, with no feedback from anybody else. For the theta state protocols, they could have a guide whose only job was to say, at intervals, “Don’t fall asleep” and otherwise to remain silent.
Target. This is the actual picture that the remote viewer should have seen while looking at Target ID# AAAT-CNXT. It is a photo of small house-like object, with a naked presumably Japanese soldier sitting on the ground (back to the camera), and three American GIs standing around. This is not a photo of anybody “storming” a hut. It’s not a photo of a battle. It’s a photo of the sad aftermath. It’s not even clear that they’re Marines; is there a World War II insignia geek in the house?
Page 1.
Okay, what I’d like to know is the time frame here, between Page 1B, which comes first, and Page 1.
Page 1B has words like “cool”, “rough”, “hard”, “whining mechanical things”, “medium”, “concrete”, “chalky”, words that could apply to anything.
Page 1 suddenly has words like “humans behind shelter”, “gunshots pop pop bang!”, “yells”, “sense of holed up in shelter or barricade”, “dirt”, and “blood”.
What I want to know is whether Dick talked to someone in between Page 1B and Page 1? Is that your “analysis”? Does that mean Dick sits with someone who knows what the target ID was referring to and perhaps “guides” his remote viewing experience, so that he came back the second time with words that were much more specific to the target?
Actually, in terms of scientific proof, it doesn’t matter whether the person he talked to knew what the target ID stood for at all–all that matters is that he talked to someone. It’s called “a contaminated sample”, when your survey subject discusses the topic with someone else in between Survey #1 and Survey #2.
Okay, so these are the things that the people in the September 10 session saw:
The target on September 10, 2001 was IBKU-THLU, Timothy Leary with Flotation Tank. Three people standing next to a big black box.
Barton’s is a tall triple line with an X through it, and a circle to the left, and an arrow indicating clockwise rotation. It looks like a perspective drawing of the lower part of the Washington Monument, or indeed, any other obelisk. The circle, to me, is obviously the sun, and the clockwise rotation indicates time passing. Nothing in there about explosions or violent death.
Ferla’s is a T with double lines, and an X through it. It looks like a highway intersection from the air, and could just as easily be taken to mean that the intersection of Route 51 and Route 121 will be blown up.
These are both quite good sketches of airplane propellors. All of the planes involved, however, were jets, which means they don’t have propellors.
Barton’s picture is of a ladder attached to a tall cylindrical building. It actually looks just like the kind of ladders that go up the sides of water tower tanks. George’s picture has a person holding a smaller 15 foot stepladder in front of a square outline.
Ladders were not in evidence during the WTC bombings. Neither were there any water towers involved.
Yes, these are drawings of dogs. And yes, Search and Rescue dogs were used at the WTC. That doesn’t prove that what George and Ferla were remote viewing was the WTC. It could just as easily have been the Westminster AKC dog show.
Why is it surprising that he drew an American flag? It’s the one he’s the most familiar with. Most folks aren’t familiar with the flags of other nations, let alone able to draw them.
This is a cross intersected by an X, with a big circle drawn around it, with two smaller circles on the bars of the cross that look like eyes. The words “thick vaporous air smoke screen defilade chopper” are shown. According to Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate, “defilade” means “to arrange fortifications so as to to protect the lines from frontal or enfilading fire and the interior of the works from plunging or reverse fire”. It’s a term from siege warfare. I didn’t see a siege at the WTC.
This is a 3-dimensional X with the word “wooden” written on it. There is a tornado coming out of it. At the top of it, there is the word “glowing” with an arrow indicated that a jet plane shape flying into the tornado is glowing. At the left side there are the words “high pitched buzzing” with an arrow indicating that the buzzing is coming from the tornado. Behind all this is a solid-looking arch, rather like the St. Louis Arch, but flatter. The word “firm” is written on it, along with something else that I can’t quite make out. “Klondike”?
I’m sorry, I don’t see how any of this has anything to do with the WTC.
This shows a man standing behind the door to a house. The doorknob shows quite clearly. This is supposed to show people stranded on the upper floors of the WTC, but they weren’t behind doors–they were behind windows.
At the top are words that say “blackboard” and “person observing pyramidal shape with flames at top” and “shhh” and “monument”. There is a human being standing next to a truncated pyramid, with loose shapes on top of the pyramid. Above the pyramid, there is a big circle with an X and a cross through it and two smaller circles on the arms of the cross, just like Sita’s picture in S4 Cascade.
Neither of the WTC towers were truncated pyramids. The Pentagon is not a pyramid. Nor were any of them “monuments”.
I can’t help noticing that every single one of the Projects involves things that can’t be either confirmed or disproved by anyone.
Erminmink–Are the Russians building an underground base in preparation for a nuclear war?
Prediction Experiment 1–predicting the next UFO sightings.
Kapitan Man–did a Russian ship use a laser against a Canadian ship in 1997?
Mars Polar Lander–find the missing Mars lander.
Ahmed Ressam–he was arrested for carrying bomb-making materials. Where was he going to plant his bomb?
The Valley Temple at Giza–go back in time 4000 years and view a pyramid.
I’ve worked my way through all of Dick’s session for this, Target WJOY-FXVX, and I don’t see how anybody figured that what he was remote viewing was the Pyramids at Giza. The ideograms are vague. There are landscape sketches, one very nice one of a jeep driving down a road. There’s a tent. There are piles of dirt. The rest are just geometrical shapes.
And the circle/cross/eyes graphic from the WTC remote viewing again.
And the last Project, the Keno Experiment, is just baffling. Click on a “game” and what comes up is a scorecard, but no explanations, no links, no Target IDs. Huh?
**
Okay, this is whereGlenn supposedly predicted the next UFO sighting from viewing Target KLZO-MDRR
They had his sked notarized. I would like to point out that having something notarized doesn’t really prove anything. All the notary is attesting to is that this particular person in this particular time and place signed this particular piece of paper. It doesn’t attest to the truth of what’s written on the piece of paper.
Okay, I have now worked my way through Glenn’s session, and all I see is the usual collection of vague ideograms and words that could mean anything. More “blackboard” notes, more circle/cross/eyes graphics.
“Eight days” seems considerably more than “three days”.
According to the news report, it wasn’t a UFO but a meteor, or possibly flaming falling space junk.
The notarized prediction is very specific. It predicts a “significant UFO event”. A “meteor” is not the same thing as a UFO, which by definition is an “unidentified flying object”.
Also, it predicts it will appear between Pearl Harbor and Ewa Beach, but according to the news report, it was sighted all over the islands.
Map of Hawaii.
Hawaii is a chain of, basically, four islands or groups of islands. Reading from left to right, they are Kauai, Oahu (which hosts Honolulu, Pearl Harbor, and Ewa Beach), the group that includes Mauai, and finally the Big Island. This is a range of about 260 miles from the western end of Oahu to the eastern end of the Big Island.
Ewa Beach is right there at the entrance to Pearl Harbor. Saying “a UFO will appear between Pearl Harbor and Ewa Beach” is like saying, “a UFO will appear between Coney Island and New York Harbor”. Predicting that a UFO will appear over Pearl Harbor is, IMO, considerably different from predicting that one will appear that will be seen all the way from one end of the Hawaiian chain to the other, which Glenn did not do.
And what about the rest of the prediction? “Duration of 20 minutes”. No. It happened at 2:41 a.m., not from 2:41 to 3:01 a.m.
There wasn’t enough time even to wake up the planetarium manager so he could see it. If it had taken 20 minutes, I’d think that someone would have phoned him to say, “Hey, go look out your window…” And, if it had taken 20 minutes, it would have generated a lot more media covereage than the squib here.
How about the part where it says “with some disruption of air traffic control at Hawaii International Airport”? I don’t see any mention of this in the news report.
You don’t have to be a computer wizard. All you do is right-click the mouse on the link, instead of left-clicking, and a little menu comes up, says, down towards the bottom, “Copy Shortcut”. You click on this, and then do Control-C, which invisibly copies the URL of the link on the computer’s clipboard. Then you go directly to where you want the URL to appear (the Reply window, WordPad, wherever) and do Control-V which is Paste. The URL of the link will appear. And here at the SDMB, the vBulletin software will automatically make it into a link. Just Copy and Paste any URL and it’ll do that.
Well, sorry, but this particular skeptic has decided for herself that the sessions do not back up the claim.
David wrote:
Kelly, you’ve hit upon one of the reasons many people consider “military intelligence” to be an oxymoron. It’s true–your tax dollars (and mine) went to fund studies of psychic power. Needless to say, the cold war didn’t end because some guy could bend a key.
Bend a key…? What does that have to do with research into remote viewing?
–
David wrote:
Over a period of more than 20 years, the CIA and Pentagon spent approximately $20 million to study and employ numerous “psychics.” They were supposed to help track down terrorists, find hostages, help anti-drug activities, etc. Experiments were conducted on precognition, clairvoyance, and remote viewing.
They did it for about 18 years, and it was of no use. Yeah, that really makes sense.
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David wrote:
You are correct that the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was involved. Apparently, this project began with help from Russell Targ and Harold Putthoff, who had previously “tested” Uri Geller–that should tell you something right off the bat.
What should it tell? Geller was suspected of using tricks by Targ and Puthoff, and they concluded he was “not worth the effort.”
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David wrote:
Anyway, our tax dollars supported this nonsense while they came up with stories much like ones we are used to hearing from proponents of “psychics”–tales which could not easily be verified or falsified, and which underwent changes in the telling over time.
What tales exactly?
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David wrote:
As we would expect, Hyman and Utts disagreed on how the studies rated. While both agreed that the first “era of research was problematic,” Utts said there was “a statistically robust effect,” while Hyman noted that “there’s no evidence these people have done anything helpful for the government.”
Considering the fact that Hyman and Utts didn’t actually have access to any of the operational data, the CIA/AIR study is of little value.
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David wrote:
Sorry, guys, but objective scientific results shouldn’t depend on who’s running a study!
That may not apply when the subjects of a study are human. With atoms and such psychological issues (motivation etc.) are of no concern.
This topic has now degenerated into quote/counter-quote, posters taking snipes at a dozen or so statements by a prior poster, without adding anything substantive.
If there is nothing further to be said, I will close this post, and y’all can continue snipping at each other in the forum called BBQ PIT.
My judgement on whether there is anything more to be said will be based on the next few posts.
As Administrator, I has now SPOKEN, twice. Pay heed, ye mighty, and despair.
I have read the posts in this thread with some interest. Petra, I think was hoping to stimulate some thought and dialog about the subject of Remote Viewing. The Military Intelligence projects in the area of Cognitive research have been documented in the public sector fairly well with publications and research. Research conducted at the Stanford Research Institute, The Rand Corp, Princton, Duke, and a few other think tanks not know to the public. In the United States Army both the Army Security Agency and the Intelligence Security Command conducted research that spanned over 26 years. The United States Naval Security Group as well the Air Force Electronic Security Squadron had research programs in this area of cognition. The Defense Intelligence Agency as well as the Central Intelligence Agency conducted programs in Remote Viewing also. Project names of Sentinel, Gondola Wish, Scanate, Center Lane, Sunstreak, Stargate, and Melange included research in Remote Viewing and or Cognitive Field Studies. Reported to the Government by the smartest men of our times in the Kress Report Recently declassified.
Those of you who are skeptical should consider doing a bit more research than what you have before you close your minds to the possibility of expanded consciousness.
The programs were a mixture of success and failure. We learned that some people with the proper training can indeed produce data that aided and assisted the intelligence needs of the United States of America. The Soviet Union, the Chinese Republic, The Australians, the British, the Begians, and others have investigated cognition and Remote Viewing.
As a Veteran of SOF Intelligence activies including Remote Viewing I am in a unique position to reply to any questions about the application of this skill. In the interest of fairness, I will not treat you questions as you have treated Petra’s. I will give them a rational answer suitable for increasing your understanding in a field where you are indeed much too uninformed to comment beyond information gathering. Straight Dope is just that.
Um, what? A warning? A second warning? What? I don’t remember hearing a FIRST warning.
Saying WHAT again, louder?
Your posts so far in this thread.
Post #1.
Post #2.
As an Administrator, seems to me you have now spoken, once. Unless there’s some kind of secret SDMB access code to your first warning that I don’t have, because I missed the meeting. I mean, WTF, Dex?
Wha’? Rebuttals, with quotes? Is that what you’re talking about? Just like in all of the million or so other threads here?
Wha’? Sniping? A supporter of remote viewing has started a thread in a forum, has taken issue with points raised in a Mailbag article, and we are rebutting his points. Sniping?
Wha’? The Fork?
If I haven’t added anything substantive, I hereby swear to remain in MPSIMS for the rest of my posting life at the SDMB, which won’t be for very long, I assure you.
A warning? A second warning? What? 
