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ABSTRACT: The American Institutes for Research (AIR) recently produced a report on the effectiveness of US government-funded research in demonstrating the existence of a remote viewing effect that could be used for intelligence-gathering purposes. The most recent studies in this program were carried out by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and these studies were the focus of the assessment. The evaluators concluded that the ten SAIC studies reviewed contained no obvious flaws. One of the evaluators used eight methodological criteria to assess the studies, and chose one of the experiments-Experiment One-to demonstrate the use of the criteria: the experiment appeared to satisfy all eight. The publication of this report prompted the first author (R. W.) to become interested in attempting to replicate the SAIC research into remote viewing. Before doing so, R. W. examined the protocol used in Experiment One as a potential template for the replication. This examination uncovered a number of possible pathways of information leakage apparently present in the study. In addition, problems were encountered by the SAIC team in reconstructing a number of unrecorded procedural details concerning Experiment One. The implications of this assessment for Experiment One and the AIR report are discussed.
For over 20 years, the US government has funded experiments that examine the possible existence of "remote viewing," the ability to psychically acquire information from a distant location. During the early 1970s, this work was carried out at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The program was transferred to SRI International (formerly SRI) in 1973, and then continued between 1992 and 1994 at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).
In September 1995, the American Institutes for Research (AIR), contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency, assembled a "blue ribbon" panel to evaluate this research (Mumford, Rose, & Goslin, 1995). This panel included two reviewers chosen for their familiarity with parapsychological research: Dr. Jessica Utts, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Davis and Dr. Ray Hyman, a psychologist at the University of Oregon.
Utts (1995) used eight methodological criteria to assess ten of the SAIC studies, and chose one of the experiments-Experiment One-to demonstrate the use of the criteria; the experiment appeared to satisfy all eight and obtained statistically significant results. Hyman (1995) also stated that he...