1304: Remote Viewing | Skeptical Sunday

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday, co-host, writer and researcher Nick Bell. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact

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But the United States government has put tons of money into something called Remote Viewing. The idea here is wild through what's basically a kind of meditation. You can supposedly see in your mind's eyes something that's happening across the state, across the world, even across the galaxy.

Project Stargate, no, not the movie with Kurt Russell and James Spader, but a real government project sought to develop psychic super spies who could look into the most secure rooms of the Kremlin. And then, I don't know, draft reports, or whatever. And now, I know what you're thinking, this can't possibly be real, right?

That would be a waste of taxpayer dollars, but here we are all a bit.

It sounds like nonsense, but here's the thing, the government spent millions of taxpayer dollars,

and more than two decades trying to figure out if this could actually work. That alone makes it worth looking at if only to understand how something this strange made it into serious military research. Here today to help me see things clearly is writer and researcher Nickpell. James Bond with a crystal ball people, that's what we're talking about today.

Yeah, that's basically what remote viewing is, but for those who aren't already aware, yet explain this, man. It's so bizarre.

“Honestly, James Bond with a crystal ball is really not the worst way of putting it, okay?”

But the strictest definition of remote viewing is the ability to perceive, distant and unseen targets using extra sensory perception, commonly known as ESP. So basically, the idea is that you either have this innate psychic ability to do this, or you can be trained to do so through a sort of meditation. Can you explain what this is where it comes from, because it's so hard to believe,

the United States government came up with this in the '60s, based on something they saw on an episode of the outer limits or whatever, come on. That's a deep cut and a good show beyond just a cultist cooks trying to train themselves in the art of clairvoyance. We have studies on this extending all the way back into the 19th century.

These scientific tests examined people thought to be psychically gifted in extremely limited and controlled circumstances. Did any of the tests say that people could remotely view things?

Like, was it real at all? Yes, but the problem is they generally weren't accepted

by the scientific community or respected at all. It's a weird catch 22 because they're doing these studies, but the scientific community only cares

“about what they find if they find that remote viewing isn't real, okay?”

They're not really in the best position, but there's more to with that. There's a man named Joseph Banks Ryan who's more Googleable name is JB Ryan. He's the founder of Paris Psychology. What's Paris Psychology? Paris Psychology is like psychic stuff.

Okay, so it's like bullshit. It's a scientific field that studies something that is not real so far. Yeah, this isn't going to be the last Ghostbusters reference on this episode, but

Of course, like we're going to get the one professor of Paris Psychology at NYU. Yeah, okay, so as far as we know, the field is very small, so I should not exist in basically. Yeah, he's a founder of this. He decides to do broader population tests, random people instead of just

the amazing Chris Weller or some other Swami. Tell me the amazing Chris Weller is a real guy.

“The amazing Chris Weller is absolutely a real guy and you should go watch the film Ed Wood.”

He was a confident of America's finest director, Edward D Wood Jr. But yeah, Ed Wood's a great film about an amazing American icon who's sadly was not a remote viewer. We could talk more about him. So JB Ryan tries really hard to look at this from a scientific perspective and make the tests as limited and falseifiable as he possibly can. He gets some results that support the notion of extrasensory perception or ESP of which remote viewing is one kind, but he really

doesn't want to release them to the broader scientific community because he knows they're going to be

seen as weird and inherently flawed because they find some evidence of ESP. How good are his studies?

Because as I'm aware and you're aware, you can make a study say like anything provided you design the study in the right way. Which is clearly like because I know this is going to be a criticism especially of me. We're not saying that all studies are nonsense. We're saying that some studies are nonsense and they say, you know, what they're designed to say. None of Ryan's other studies have been reliably replicated. So for those of you playing at home, his studies are junk.

And it's not for lack of trying or people actively trying to sabotage his legacy. People try to extremely hard to replicate his studies and they came up short. So Ghostbusters, you guys,

everybody here over the age of 35 probably remembers the scene in Ghostbusters with the cards.

Right. Yes, where Bill Murray is torturing the male grad student and flirting with the female one, while they try and guess what images are on the other side of playing cards. Yeah. So that's based on one of Ryan's experiments. Princeton University did over 25,000 trials with 132 subjects. They found zero evidence of the SP. And I feel like remote viewing is already off to a bad start. Because if you can't see what's on the other side of a playing card,

three feet in front of you, I'm not really sure that you're going to be able to find the secret Nazi bases on the dark side of the moon. Ray is Ryan a crack or just too credulous or what you said he was a serious scientist. So why are his studies so bad?

“Here's the thing, he's a serious scientist, but he's kind of not a very good one. The general”

consensus is that he's not a fraud. He's just, he has a really bad methodology. And possibly because he was just bad at science, possibly because he really wanted to, he really wants the SP to be real. And it could also just be a combination of both. But we know his methodology is flawed. We know that he really wants the SP to be real. And we know his studies are junk because no one's ever replicated them. His research took place at Duke, which eventually spun off the Ryan research

center, which is still active today. It's funny to think of a serious institution like Duke doing cookie bad science like this. What is Ryan's lab up to these days? They're researching a lot of the stuff that we're talking about here. Different forms of mind-over-matter energy healing. They claim very infatically that all of these different ESP phenomena are real. They're focused less on proving that it's real, which that may provide some insight into what's wrong with their

methodology. They consider this settled science. They just think it's all real. And now they just want to explain how it works. You could get online courses that will help you to hone your psychic abilities. They also act as a community hub for people who believe in ESP, remote viewing,

“whatever you want to call it. So how did the strange dark corner of Cold War research begin anyway?”

Where did it all this come from? It sounds like something out of the weirdness of the 60s and it's sort of is in the sense that most of what people think of as the 60s actually took place in the 70s. The key government project here was the Stargate project, which took place at Fort Mead in Maryland. Is this what that movie is that the men who stare at goats is out with that's based on? Sort of the movie is fictional, but most of the characters are composites or just loosely based on

someone else. It gives you a flavor of the kind of high weirdest that was going on at Fort Mead

about Ron COVID. It could fictionalize. Got it. So it's a sort of loose retelling of actual events

“without being beholden to anything specific. Yes. The Stargate project was actually the name of the”

consolidated project. Originally, it was a whole bunch of different military intelligence programs with fancival names like Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sunstreak, Scangate, and Stargate. And then what they eventually all got lumped together into an official government project. One was that. Man, you're going to think this is nuts. 1991. Wow. So as recently as when I'm 11 years old, the government is still trying to figure out how to train soldiers to see things on the other side

of the planet with their mind. Yeah. They actually closed this project in 1995. So either during my freshman or sophomore year of high school. What I love about this story so far is that it's not just a bunch of weird acid burnouts in a basement in 1969. It's multiple arms of the military and intelligence community over a period of decades that ended when Dr. Dre was on the radio already. Jeez, man. What? Come on. It's just another day. Let me ride, man. That's the one. It was actually

run out of a leaky wooden barracks apparently. But yes, you're correct. They did stuff other than remote viewing, but remote viewing was the primary focus of the project. This was the aspect of ESP. They were most concerned about figuring out because the thinking is that if you can master remote viewing, you have a massive edge on all of America's adversaries. You don't need to embed some

“dude into a fake life for a decade and hope that you get access to top secret documents.”

You can just have him project his mind halfway across the world and view the top secret micro fish and then report back what he saw all from the comfort of his Cheeto stained bedroom or something or leaky barracks or whatever. Yeah. So how does this even start? Like at what point is some general or whatever in the US Army sitting around and he's like, you know what we need? Psychics. They actually did this in response to a Soviet program that was spending

60 million rubles annually. That's about $1220. Yeah, it's like $125 million in current

US dollars. It's hard to actually accurately pinpoint how much it is. There's different ways of converting Soviet money from 1975 to US dollars today. I've tried to do that recently where you're like, and it's like rubles, no to no Soviet rubles. And they're like, you can use this number, which is like the number the government gives, so you can use this number, which is what it is actually worth on the free market that it wasn't traded on and you're like, okay, so yeah,

it's a tricky calculation somehow. 125 million bucks. In current money, that doesn't seem like a lot for a defense project. I guess the technology is people's brains, though, which are in plentiful support. Maybe it's a light lift. I don't know. I can't tell if you're serious or not. Yeah,

neither can I. That's not a lot of money. 125 million. Okay, now I'm not sure if I'm joking either.

Okay, so they learn the Soviets are doing this. The Soviets did a lot of stuff. A lot of it was obviously stupid. Perhaps it's a big reason why they're not around anymore. The Soviets claim that they were getting results from it. Okay, but didn't we also claim we had like lasers satellites

“that could shoot down their missiles? So I don't know where they getting results from it?”

Yeah, the Duffman says a lot of things. And the Soviets definitely said a lot of things. But there's no hard evidence that they ever got any kind of real results from this. There were a lot of anecdotes, but very little in the way of repeatable experiments. I think something to note about the Soviet Union in general, it's not like you were going to get fired. And in the 70s, you're probably not going to get ghoulogged either. There's a lot of bureaucratic pressure to just create

bullshit reports. So it looks like everything is great and nothing is going wrong. I'm sure this exists everywhere. A bureaucracy exists. But the Soviets took this to a new level of mastery. People should watch the HBO mini series Chernobyl. Yeah, I loved it. Yeah, it's just great. But one of the things that's great about is portraying this extreme disbelief of Soviet bureaucracy that anything can go wrong. They're looking at an exploded reactor and being like, "That didn't explode because Soviet

reactors don't explode." Case closed. Yep, case closed. Reality disagrees with the bureaucratic form that I'm looking at. So reality must be wrong. You don't have to be clairvoyant to know that an ad break is coming. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Factor. Weeknight dinners are a race against the clock at our house. Once the kids are home from school,

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right away. And once again, a two-minute read. We're not taking all morning for you. Jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. So back to the Americans finding out about Soviet remote viewing. Why are the Americans so keen on doing this? Like he said, the Soviets threw money into researching all kinds of stuff. Did no one stand up and go, hey, this is obviously crazy. Why are we throwing money at this? Well, I'm sure somebody did at some point, but here's the

thing. It didn't matter if the Soviets were having any success with remote viewing. It's simply matter that the Americans believed that they were having success with it. And the American program starts in the '70s when Dittont has ended. That's the period of time when there's better relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Cold Wars ramping up again and along with it is Cold War spending. So in one sense, they're just throwing spaghetti at a

wall and trying to see what will stick. The American government is absolutely fine with using taxpayer dollars to fund American remote viewing research if there's even a small possibility that they can get it to work, especially if they think the Soviets are already getting it to work. Yeah, that makes sense. I have to say remote viewing. It almost seems like a marketing term to avoid having to say clairvoyance or psychic. So in a sense, this is just a scientist version of clairvoyance

where you can sense or see things outside of your body. Astral projection is the alleged ability to project your consciousness out of your body, but people are generally claiming to visit other dimensions or worlds and go on these weird adventures when they claim to be. Astraly projecting,

“I think we can fairly say that remote viewing is just a way of framing clairvoyance in a more”

sciencey way. In the middle of the 20th century, there's a lot of different attempts to re-brand psychic phenomenon out of the world of woo and say that we can actually study it. Hence why we have remote viewing protocols that allegedly make it possible to verify whether or not someone can actually do this. So what are these protocols? That sounds sciencey and advanced. Yeah, so there are a whole lot. I'll try and make this as simple and straightforward as possible

so that people can hopefully follow along without getting lost. First, they isolate the viewer

in a quiet room and use a monitor or a facilitator to guide the session. The target, which is going to be a photograph and object, a location, a set of coordinates, is unknown to both the viewer and the monitor. So it's double blind. Eventually, the target just becomes a string of random numbers. This is what they call coordinates and the viewer goes through a series of steps or stages to determine what the target is. It's a whole process that runs from basic vague impressions to detail 3D modeling.

They would make clay models of the thing they were allegedly seeing. It sounds impressive that

this is a very old carnival magician trick. I was just going to say my friend O's Pearlman is a

“world famous mentalist magician guy. This kind of just sounds like a less exciting version of what he”

does. He's very straightforward that this is a trick. It is not really magic. I know there are psychic shows where people in the audience draw something or write a word on a card. I've seen magicians do this. Mentalists do this and the alleged psychic can then duplicate it or something along those things. How does that work? Does that work? Actually. In that case, it works either because there's a plant in the audience or they've just gotten really good at knowing that

almost everyone is going to draw a stick figure or something or else they just described the drawing rather than attempting to duplicate it. They use vague terms. There's all kinds of ways to pull

this off and all of them can be used to account for any degree of success with remote viewing research.

Who came up with these protocols? Was this a government thing or did they pick up something that was already around? The protocols were actually formulated by a man named Ingo Swan who was an artist and self-proclaimed psychic. He was from New York. He got involved with physicist Russell Targ and Harold Puthoth at the Stanford Research Institute, which has a lot of connections to the American military and government. Swan worked with Puthoth to develop coordinate remote viewing. In fact,

Swan is kind of the driver for all these attempts to make remote viewing into a science. If you want to credit or blame anyone for turning this from a fringe, a cold belief to something the United States government is studying, Swan is the guy. Okay, so does Stanford Research Institute have anything to do with Stanford University? Because that, that would be a little surprising. It's a little too credible for me. Sort of, the Stanford Research Institute was founded by trustees of the university,

but it's been fully independent since the 70s. Russell Targ and Harold Puthoth were originally physicists and not everything that was happening at Stanford Research was related to psychic phenomenon. In fact, very little of it was, but they got a lot of attention for what they were doing because they worked with Yuri Galler. He's the guy used to go on the tonight show and be like, "I'm going to bend to spoon with my mind." He's obviously a very talented magician and

mentalist or whatever it is. And I could be wrong here, but if memory serves, he doesn't outright say these are tricks and you, that's like most magicians will say this is a trick. When Penn and Teller shoot a gun and the teller catches the bullet at his teeth,

“if they tell you it's a trick, and I think Yuri is like, "I do real magic." And it's like part”

show, but then he's like willing to offer his services as a consultant for oil companies, because he can divine where oil is in the ground. There's a little sort of shade of like, way, way, way, way, way. You're not telling the whole truth here, maybe, in a way that's not quite kosher. Yeah, and he's been pretty discredited more than once. We're going to be careful because he's also very litigious, but his connection with Stanford Research is actually really important,

because he was the main subject of a 1974 article in Nature. This is a really prestigious and serious science journal. It's kind of the high watermark for the Institute's Psychic Research, but it also exposes their bad methodology to the broader scientific community. So Geller totally humiliates himself onto tonight's show, where he can't perform anything, but excuses for Johnny Carson and the audience. He was completely exposed by James Randi as,

not doing real magic. Let's put it that way. Yeah, James Randi is a stage magician who, in his spare time, light discrediting frauds and coax science, which is weirdly a side hobby of a lot of stage magicians. Yes, pen and teller as well. And again, who better to do it? Right? Like, my buddy, O's Pearlman, again, episode 12, 24. I've seen him do a lot of things. It's not just on my

show, but it's always this is a trick. This is not supernatural. And pen and teller, like, you

catch the bullet in the teeth or they'll say, this is a trick multiple times per show. I just feel like that's the way you do it. I mean, there was a guy who guessed that I was thinking about North Korea as a vacation spot in San Francisco. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. And he's like, yep, this is really cool. And he was just like a nice guy. And I was like, yeah, you're pretty up front.

“This is a trick. He's like, I think it's really important. I don't think I've met a magician”

in real life who won't readily tell you that this is a trick. It's like the white hat Jedi ethos of magicians to be like, this is not real magic, just so everyone knows that's just part of their thing. Yeah, and it's getting a little far field, but like, it doesn't make it any less cool or impressive. No, I agree. It's actually more impressive because if it's magic, you just go, now that I would believe it. Oh, it's magic. You go, it's magic. But if you're like, I'm still like,

how did he guess Tom Brady's pin number? What the hell? And then it's like, how did he know the

The fact that the trick keeps me that and you admit it keeps me thinking about it much longer than if I were, let's say, a believer in magic. And I was like, well, it's magic, nothing to think about here. I can't do it. And he can. The fact that it's a trick has me thinking about it. I'll be thinking about it for years. Like, I was the guy who guessed North Korea. I'm like, where was there camera? Do you overhear me? Does he have secret mics? Was my friend in on the

trick? I just don't understand how he did it. And I never will. And I'm going to think about it for 20 years.

“So I'm with it. That's what you should handle it. But I would love to drop some links to Randy”

and the Carson thing in the show notes. Yeah, I'll make sure to drop links related to James Randy's Expose and the Johnny Carson appearance in the show notes. And it's also awesome because it's from I believe the arrow when people smoke cigarettes on television. Yes, so he's smoke at a cigarette at the desk. I know I just whenever I see those clips on like Holy smokes, I think Larry King used to do that too. Although it might have been before he was on television.

He was just on radio. But it was like, yeah, those guys were just popping down unfiltered candles. Live TV may be slightly prerecorded. TV crazy. That was my brand man. So you're really

making me miss cigarettes. Yeah, we used to be a proper country. So what came out after the

publication in nature was that precisely no scientist had ever seen Yuri Galler bend a spoon that he hadn't touched. In fact, they were laying him disappear into the bathroom with spoons.

“And for the most part, they were just taking his word for it. Sure, that's science. So not totally”

related to remote viewing, but it does say a lot about the work that was coming out of the Institute at Stanford. Come on, man. Yeah, exactly. Were there any other studies in mainstream scientific journals about this supposedly psychic work that was taking place at the Stanford Institute? As for other major publications in 1976, the Journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ran a supportive paper by Targ and Puthoff. Much like the nature article,

there was massive pushback from the scientific community about their methodology. Okay, in what way? The scientific community figured out that they weren't following standard protocols that apply to experimental psychology, which is a real thing. One of the main things that they found was that despite claims of being double blind, there was tons of evidence that the viewers were being given cues about their targets. Eventually external reviewers decided that what they were doing

did not even meet the bar to qualify as science, which I'm sure was just confirmation to a lot of people that the man was trying to shut all this down. That's a common theme that runs throughout

“this, and I think it's kind of important to note that science is simply the scientific method.”

It's simply applying a set of epistemic principles to your research, to say that they're not meeting that bar, is not to say, well, they found some cookie stuff, so we're throwing it all out. It's saying that they're not meeting the bar for what counts as the scientific method. The more the psychic researchers and remote viewers are discredited, though, the more people want to believe that there's some shadowy conspiracy to suppress the truth.

My first reaction is that if the United States government spent tons of money on it,

there has to be something to it, and I know that that's not great logic. -Sarcasm again, again, again, one now that the words have come out of my mouth, I also cannot tell. I guess it's probably too hard for me to believe even though I should that the U.S. government would waste money on just something as dumb as this. But now once again, as those words come out of my mouth, it should not surprise me in any way at all that the U.S. government is willing to light

millions, tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on fire for something is obviously fake, is this. -Yeah, there's all kinds of government programs that are just on their face stupid. This was particularly true during the Cold War when anyone who promised a new way to get the drop on the Ruskies was almost certainly guaranteed in a figure budget to do so. I mean, in the other kind of like factor in terms of this is like money is absolutely falling out of the sky in general

in the 50s and 60s and 70s, but especially for Cold War research, anything that's going to help get an edge in the Cold War, there's money for that, specific examples in practice for the people who just thank God Nick Pell's the guy who hates the government, which you are. -But I am, but there's things that I just they're like, yeah, I don't really know about that, and then there's stuff that's come out. This is stupid. Project Blue Book, which was dedicated to

UFOs, there were attempts to communicate with dolphins. There's this whole wave of interest in the paranormal and psychic phenomena during the 60s. Obviously, there's the whole new age movement and

government were definitely convinced that you could train soldiers to be psychic spies.

-The government may have wasted millions of dollars on fake psychics, but you don't have to waste a dime. Thanks to the great deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored by Superpower. There's really nothing more important than your health. You can have success in a wonderful family, but if your health goes sideways,

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I knew about Project Blue Book. The dolphins thing I've not heard. That one's new to me. To be fair, some of it is less weird than you would think like trying to train dolphins

“to find explosive underwater minds, which works by the way. Yeah, so I think I have heard of it.”

That's definitely less crazier than I thought. I didn't even recently find a dolphin from the Russian military in the water near Norway or something like that. I mean, I think we still have these kinds of programs. For that specific example, I'm not aware of, but I do know that yes, they've had some success in training dolphins to find things, which is, yeah, that's not telling me that you can see what's going on Saturday. That's telling me that you've trained a mammal to

perform a task, which like happens every day. Yes, this is the nautical equivalent of having your dog catch a frisbee. It's not supernatural. It's just cool. Yeah, or like I live in a tiny little town. We got police dogs, like you can train smart mammals to do things, like no kidding. I'm not surprised by this. Did they ever actually find anything to confirm that remote viewing had any merit at all,

basically? Wow, this is going to be the shocker of the episode. I hope everybody's ready.

Drumroll. They did not want. And look, I know that this is so anti-climactic, but it's the most important part of the story because the United States government spent over 20 years, multiple programs with these fanciful code names, and they could not point to a single

“example where remote viewing produced actionable intelligence. Why did it go on for so long?”

I think a lot of reasons ranging from wishful thinking to government-largest to bad methodology, the line item for this on a budget compared to nukes is tiny, and everyone working on it wanted it to be real. The studies were often supposed to be double-blind, but in practice they were single-blind, and that allows the monitor to suddenly cue the viewer. I know what you mean when you say double-blind and single-blind, but can you just briefly explain those for people who might

not know? Double-blind study means that neither the viewer nor the monitor know what the target is, or anything about it, single-blind would mean that the monitor knows. Single-blind studies have an inherent flaw in them, but that doesn't make them totally useless. Single-blind studies are very helpful at getting us all kinds of information. But in this case, however, the concern is that the monitors eager to confirm that remote viewing work were finding ways to cue the viewers consciously,

or otherwise, they could be doing it unconsciously, just because they really want the guy to succeed. The other thing is, okay, the viewer describes something and so what? It's cold? Okay, is that like

Cold covers every temperature below 50 degrees? Right, yeah, do we mean hoodie weather or the

deepest reaches of outer space? Exactly, and you can apply this to so many vague adjectives. Big object. Okay, so is it a Mac truck, a skyscraper, a planet, a super cluster of black holes at the center of a galaxy? What exactly are you talking about? You could describe my son as being big. He's a large eight-year-old. This could be anything. What the hell is big? And a lot of descriptions

“were at that level of detail. It's a large cold object. Cool, is that an iceberg or the planet Pluto?”

I don't know if Pluto's a planet this week or not, but yeah, not a planet anymore, I think, but yeah, exactly. One actual example of a description was a windmill, which the description of which was

a large metallic object. That could be like a Costco-sized can of soup or an F-60.

Yeah, what was the government response to spending all that money on something that turned out to be totally useless? Just finger pointing to other people? Look at the war on poverty, Jordan. The government can flush trillions of dollars completely down the toilet. There's no accountability. Yes, government bad, but still there has to be some kind of official response to the government spending nine figures on psychic, super-spice that turned out to be completely fake.

The CIA hired the American Institutes for Research to look at the programs as a whole. The two main researchers were Jessica Utt, who was a pro-parasicology statistician and Ray Hyman, a skeptical psychologist. What they found was that the studies were, and I quote, statistically interesting, whatever that means, but they were operationally useless. There was absolutely nothing they could use. Remote viewers sometimes accurately described to general

features like a large building, something metallic or near water, getting near water is like there could be a pool down the street. But there wasn't a single case where remote viewing gave unique, verifiable information. These studies were junk. What did they get that was? What was

“it statistically interesting or at the very least interesting? What did they find?”

One of the big things that the supporters of remote viewing point two is a man named Pat Price saying there was a crane near a Soviet nuclear facility. Okay, so was there a crane near a Soviet nuclear facility? There was, but pictures of it had already leaked. He could have seen them in either way, cool man, crane near a Soviet nuclear facility. So what? How many Soviet nuclear facilities are there? How many of them have had a crane near them at some point? I would bet

damn near close to all of them. Have had a crane by them at some point. So to give this a little extra color, Pat Price was a former police officer who claimed that he was seeing underground bases guarded by aliens. Oh, wow. I think I know the answer to this. But where are their aliens guarding underground bases? Not that we ever found. Pat Price died of a heart attack in Las Vegas, which his supporters

claim was a government hit. Yes, the government always uses cocaine and strippers to take their

“victims out in Vegas. Honestly, looking at all your examples, I could get that level of accuracy”

if I try. Ah, there's a big piece of equipment near a big smoke stack looking thing at a nuclear facility and it's like correct, literally every single, yeah. There's millions of dollars in government contracts just waiting for you. Sadly, they stop handing them out in 1995. There are other examples that proponents will point to like finding hostages or missing planes, but all of these broke down under closer scrutiny. There's several things that work, making remote viewing,

have the veneer of legitimacy. First, there's what's called apophilia, the good word to know because it's the tendency of the human brain to want to find patterns. Okay, seeing clouds that are shaped like things are seeing a face in a clock or something that's not really there, right? Is that what we're talking about? Your brain is just hard-wired to find patterns. So if you look at any random data, you're going to start making connections. So what? Does it mean anything?

Yeah, the guy was named John Nash in a beautiful mind and he's got the string that are connecting all the things that aren't there on the cork board. He was like mentally ill and people found that. Look, I read William Burrow's at two young of an age and he's got a whole thing that he calls the 23 in Eggman. How you're going to see the number 23 everywhere and it's like, yeah, I'm going to see it everywhere now because you told me to see it, confirmation bias, whatever it's going to.

example, Swan said that Jupiter as in the planet had rings before the Voyager saw that there were super faint rings there. And it's like, did he predict that? Maybe he probably just got lucky. What a lot of remote viewers described could be considered Barnum statements. These are statements that are generic enough that they could be describing just about anything. And this was a lot of

what remote viewing described. Experimenter bias always impacts studies and it's wide double blind

“protocols are so important, especially when you're studying something as bizarre as remote viewing.”

Finally, Arkham's Razor simple explanations were just better than fanciful ones. Random chance in lucky guessing are just simpler than having to believe in some elaborate mythos about how remote viewing supposedly works. The CIA said and I'm quoting, beginning the quote, no remote viewing report ever provided actionable intelligence and quote, the few apparent hits were indistinguishable from chance or lucky guessing. So it's good work if you can get it. I suppose

for anyone wanting to know more, the CIA's 1995 Stargate documents, those are declassified and available online now as is the report from the American Institutes for Research. Skeptical critiques by Ray Hyman and others are likewise available online. We can drop some of those in the show notes as well. Before we move on from this, I do want to just briefly say that there's also a 40 halo these studies had real scientists are working on it in senior officers. While the anecdotes felt

somewhat compelling to some people, it wasn't as if no one was complaining about it. One DIA memo complained that remote viewing reports produced excessive generalities and required too much interpretation to be of operational use. Yeah, you could say that again. There's definitely a lot of weird science projects that were going on in the military and intelligence communities during the Cold War, but this one just strikes me as especially odd because they they just got absolutely

nothing in the way of results. Right, so at least MK Ultra tells us you can psychically torture

“a promising young math student that Harvard into becoming the unit bomber. Wait, really?”

Oh, yeah, man, Uncle Ted was an MK Ultra test subject. Wow, man, you know a lot about the

unit bomber. He's the most important thinker of post-war America and you can fight me on that.

Anyway, in any event, I guess I see your point that even MK Ultra did something, even if there's something that it did wasn't what they expected. This on the other hand, though, this just seems like they just flush that money down the toilet. So what happened after they closed up shop on Stargate and other projects? I get the sense these scientists, they didn't just go gently into the good night of normal private sector employment. They're not reformulating

toothpaste or whatever, right? No, no, no, like any government program that's been cut that has an actual private sector demand, they went commercial. So what, is training people a lot of do you have remote viewing from the comfort of their home in 12 easy lessons? You get a zoom course from these guys? Yeah, that's basically it. Joseph McMonigle, who was one of the first people recruited for the Stargate program. He kept the faith. He said it totally worked and not only that,

you could use it to see the future of the past. He currently sells programs on mastering remote viewing among other things and some courses will tell you how to remote view the stock market. And I assume that that course is free because he's so rich himself from remote viewing the stock market that he doesn't need any money. So how much do these programs cost actually?

“As a decide, anyone selling trading programs sucks at trading and that's why they're selling”

programs and not trading. Of course, yeah, like if you have an in the next Bitcoin and like what you're doing is bag borrow and steal money to invest it, not teaching people a course on how to spot the next Bitcoin. Yeah, so the course is on how to, I don't know about hack in the stock market with remote viewing, but the course is range anywhere from $79 dollars for three hours all the way up to about 3000, but to take the master course, you have to buy all the lower level courses. So it adds

up pretty quickly if you're fully invested in it. You can also pay for one on one training with senior instructors like McMonigle. That sounds somewhat lucrative. Other people were not quite so shameless, Russell Targ made documentaries about the subject that likewise said that remote viewing

was very real, but they're not skeptical or critical and they do their best to dress the subject

up with the veneer of science. John Ronson wrote the book The Men Who Steregoats, which is historically more accurate than the movie, the book, at least, reports to be nonfiction. He's just a writer, but I just want to do included here because I do think it's just part of the broader trend of people making money off of remote viewing. Yeah, you mentioned the Stanford Research

shut down with Stargate? No, they're still with us. They're called SRI International and believe or not. They gave us Siri. I thought that was Apple Siri, so that wasn't from Apple. No, it was SRI and Apple bought it off of them. The thing about SRI is that they're just generally engaged

in various forms of research. The psychic stuff was always just one of many different things

they were doing. I see. So they went from doing some of the most useless pseudo-scientific research that has ever been conducted and moved into creating important and critical technology that I use literally every day of my life mostly because I have no choice because Siri still completely sucks, but I digress. I don't use it enough, but I'll take your word for it. They were always doing real research in SRI. It's more just that the woo crept in because there was money to me made.

Why not? I have to say man, I'm a little bummed out at how much of a complete and total nothing burger this all is. I kind of expected it to be one of those episodes where we learned that there's something to it or even that it was like inconclusive, but it looks like we came up

really short. It's not even inconclusive. It's just completely not a thing at all, full stop.

Yeah, believe it. If you like, but there's no science has ever been done to prove. Yeah, it's as real as the two fairy so far. Yeah, I definitely did want to find something for the listeners to grapple with in terms of is this real? Is there any truth to this that I can cling to and have some kind of doubt, but it's not real. It's totally not real. The really interesting story for me is how much money people were able to make off of something that is

completely and unmistakably fake. I have to say I wonder what my tax dollars are funding today that is taking the niche that remote viewing once occupied. Exactly. Do they re-dedicate the budget to some other kind of mind-reading crap for whatever? Do you think they're still researching

“stuff like remote viewing? I think they're researching something equally stupid. I wouldn't doubt it.”

I think there's a deeper lesson to be learned here. You can make a study say anything and they did

just that for years. Even if the claims made by a research paper seem sound on their face, you might have to dig deeper to find the problem and knowing the most basic scientific principles can help you cut through quackery. Scientists, even while meaning ones can and do make mistakes and in the case of remote viewing, some were true believers who saw what they wanted while others were probably just there for a check. Thanks to Nick for helping us get the 10,000 foot view

of this nonsense. And thank you for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of skeptical Sunday to me, Jordan at Jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, discounts, deals, ways to support the show all at Jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm @jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. In this show, it's created dissociation with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jason Sanderson, Tata Sidlauskes, Robert Fogardy, Ian Barred, Gabriel Mizrahi,

our advice and opinions are our own and I am a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Of course, we try to get these as right as we can and not everything is gospel even if it's fact checked so consult a professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being. Remember, we rise by lifting others, share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the

skepticism and knowledge that we dulled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.

“What if mind reading wasn't magic at all but the result of empathy, psychology and awareness?”

In this preview world-renowned mentalist, O's, Pearlman reveals the real secrets of influence, charisma and truly seeing others. I know how people think. A mentalist is kind of a subset of magic, misdirection influencing deception, but it's not magic. The things you convey to me, your non-verbal communication, the way you pause, the way you enunciate, the way I move you in a certain direction by speaking very quick and then going very slow. All of that is my

instrument on how I can entertain you. Create memorable moments, but do things that appear to be psychic, appear to have no explanation that I can seemingly read to your mind. But I can't read minds. I read people. It's not supernatural. It's not psychic. I want people to know that. I am not talking to dead people or trying to rip you off. I've spent almost 30 years of reverse engineering in the human mind. It's the skills of a mentalist using your everyday world.

Cold reading, learning all the skills, learning how to manage audiences, learning how people think. If you boil down what my real skill is, it's not fooling you. It's not entertaining you.

“It's creating memorable moments and you have to define what that really means.”

Memorable moments are ones that people tell others about. And that's my secret to success. If you know how people think to create deeper bonds and better your relationships and increase your sales, it's going to help your life. Active listening and using your memory as your

To learn how small cues and genuine curiosity can make anyone more influential, confident and connected, check out episode 1230 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.