Christopher Green, M.D., Ph.D.

IRVA 2012 – Separation Anxiety: A View from the Inside of the Two Scientific Worlds of Remote Viewing

Goal of Presentation: To describe from personal, and largely past private experiences, the initial government interest and first research programs in Remote Viewing. Explain what experiments were the most important, and the most problematical. Describe how and why things were more accepted at first, and now paradoxically have become more difficult, as the field has matured.Fifty years ago Remote Viewing [RV] was simultaneously introduced into the Intelligence Communities [IC] of the East and West. Western Analysts initially discounted its scientific merit because the popular literature was meager and suspicious. HUMINT sources seemed to display loose association, were often mercurial, and refused to act systematic. To Soviet, Sino, and Western insiders RV was only viewed as the stuff for recruitment: and only after spotting and assessing the credulous. The landscape was quickly filled with disinformation, dissimulation, deceit, and junk data. Then, ten years later, it all changed.

This presentation will attempt to explain what happened, from the perspective of an eyewitness to all of the first events, who soon became a partner and participant, and sometimes problem. Special attention will be made to why the serious scientific and IC analytical community had to struggle with the anecdotal, which very often became veridical. Personal testimony suddenly came from the most credible sources. Double-blind results ruled-out magic and deceit. Serious, solid, focused and highly successful research followed. It was peer-reviewed and published in the best journals. From the inside the open-minded were rewarded with unassailable, often repeatable, and highly useful data. Then, twenty years later, it all changed again.

The speaker will argue that several inconvenient truths about RV as perceived in the broader government and scientific community, have poisoned our landscape. Some of the truths are related to the reality of RV as a tool, its reality as a hijacked opportunity, and the reality of continued exaggeration of its failures, not successes. The presenter will describe personal impressions of several disturbing situations that began to separate the analysts from the researchers, the subjects from the experimenters, and the science from the scientists. It is intended that these recollections are understood as being deeply personal, and while now public, as perceptions about our collective hubris.Several alternative explanations will be discussed for the current state: why the better science and data remain outrageous to learned Academies, why results are thought to be “statistical”, application-insensitive and expensive, and operationally uninteresting and degraded. Since those on the inside know these “academic and scientific” opinions are themselves absurd, why then, is this field so disrespected by the very governmental and academic agencies and boards that constantly claim to seek emergent science? Why did the “insiders” turn enemy? Or, …did they?

The presentation will end with two notions: first, the truths about the kinds of people who are the subjects, the researchers, and those who read the results as separate from the users. Second, what this means to us, and why we probably won’t do anything about it.