Remote viewing
"sensing" a distant or unseen target, purportedly with the mind
Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen subject, purportedly sensing with the mind. There is no scientific evidence that remote viewing is possible, and it is generally regarded as a pseudoscience. A remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person, or location hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), are generally credited with coining the term "remote viewing" to distinguish it from the closely related concept of clairvoyance. According to Targ, the term was first suggested by Ingo Swann in December 1971 during an experiment at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City.
Remote viewing experiments have historically lacked proper controls and repeatability.
The idea of remote viewing received renewed attention in the 1990s upon the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the U.S. government that attempted to determine potential military applications of psychic phenomena. The program ran from 1975 to 1995 and ended after evaluators concluded that remote viewers consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence information.
History
Early background
In early occult and spiritualist literature, remote viewing was known as telesthesia and traveling clairvoyance. Rosemary Guiley described it as "seeing remote or hidden objects clairvoyantly with the inner eye, or in alleged out-of-body travel."
The study of psychic phenomena by major scientists started in the mid-nineteenth century.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Remote viewing” as "sensing" a distant or unseen target, purportedly with the mind. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q844197. The Library of Congress control number is sh95005024. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 1975 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Remote viewing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.