Parapsychology
Parapsychology is the scientific and scholarly study of phenomena that appear to transcend conventional physical explanation, including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, and reincarnation evidence. Though long marginalized by mainstream academia, parapsychology has been the subject of serious laboratory investigation since the 1880s, and has received sustained funding and institutional support from both private foundations and, during the Cold War era, the United States government.
Origins and early research
The field traces its formal origins to the founding of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in London in 1882, which brought together scholars including Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, and Henry Sidgwick to investigate mediumship, apparitions, hypnosis, and alleged telepathy under controlled conditions. The American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), founded in 1885, performed parallel work in the United States, laying the groundwork for experimental methodology in psychic research.
The modern experimental era began with the work of J.B. Rhine at Duke University in the 1930s. Rhine coined the term "extrasensory perception" (ESP) and developed the significant Zener card tests — standardized decks of five symbols used in blind and double-blind trials to test telepathy and clairvoyance. Rhine's Rhine Research Center, still active in Durham, North Carolina, became the primary academic institution for parapsychological research in the mid-twentieth century. Rhine's statistical analyses showed that test subjects performed significantly above chance under controlled conditions, a finding that has been reproduced in many subsequent meta-analyses.
The Stargate Project and government remote viewing
The most consequential official investigation of parapsychology was the Stargate Project, a classified CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) program that ran from 1972 to 1995 to investigate remote viewing — the claimed ability to perceive distant locations, persons, or events through non-sensory means — for intelligence applications.
The program originated from research begun at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) by physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, who conducted a series of experiments with subjects including psychic Ingo Swann and former police commissioner Pat Price that demonstrated statistically significant remote viewing of geographically distant sites. The SRI research caught the attention of the CIA, which began classified funding in 1972. Over the following two decades the program expanded to include an operational unit of trained remote viewers at Fort Meade, Maryland, tasked with intelligence applications including locating hostages, tracking Soviet military assets, and identifying clandestine facilities.
Angela Ford, a retired Army intelligence analyst and remote viewer who served in the Stargate program at Fort Meade from 1986 to 1995, described the program's methodology and origins: "Remote viewing is nothing more than ESP. It's a nice term that the scientists use; it's a nice term to use if you're trying to get money from Congress instead of saying psychic... The manual was written by Stanford Research Institute."
Ford described how the Defense Intelligence Agency took over the program in 1985 after the Army's involvement was threatened: "Jack Vorona, who worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency and who was funding research into parapsychology at Stanford Research Institute and other places like Princeton and Duke University, went to Congress and said, don't shut down the program, transfer the program from Army to the Defense Intelligence Agency."
Ford also described operational successes, including locating a kidnapped Marine colonel, Richard Higgins, in Lebanon by pointing to his precise location on satellite imagery — a location confirmed weeks later by a released hostage.
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR)
The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, founded in 1979 by Princeton University Dean of Engineering Robert Jahn, conducted decades of experiments on the interaction between human consciousness and physical random processes. PEAR's primary focus was on psychokinesis (mind-matter interaction) and remote perception, using random event generators (REGs) that produced statistically analyzable outputs. Over the course of more than 25 years and millions of trials, PEAR's researchers found small but consistent deviations from chance in human-REG interactions that they argued could not be explained by conventional physics. The PEAR lab closed in 2007, with its research transferred to the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL).
Psi phenomena and classification
Parapsychology classifies its phenomena into two main categories. Extrasensory perception (ESP) encompasses telepathy (mind-to-mind communication without physical means), clairvoyance (perception of remote locations or objects), and precognition (knowledge of future events). Psychokinesis (PK) refers to the direct influence of mind on matter, ranging from macro-PK (large-scale observable effects) to micro-PK (statistical deviations in random physical processes detectable only through large data sets).
Additional phenomena studied by parapsychologists include near-death experiences (NDEs), out-of-body experiences (OOBEs), reincarnation evidence gathered by researchers such as Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia, poltergeist phenomena, and apparitional experiences.
The Ganzfeld experiments
Among the most replicated parapsychological protocols is the Ganzfeld experiment, in which a "receiver" subject is placed in a state of mild sensory deprivation (eyes covered with halved ping-pong balls, ears filled with white noise) while a "sender" attempts to mentally transmit a randomly selected target image. Meta-analyses of Ganzfeld studies, covering hundreds of experiments, consistently show hit rates above the 25% chance baseline — the most comprehensive meta-analysis by Bem and Honorton (1994) reported a 32–35% hit rate across 240 sessions. The Ganzfeld results have been replicated independently in multiple laboratories in different countries and are considered among the strongest experimental evidence for ESP in the parapsychological literature.
Connections to UFO and ET research
Parapsychology intersects significantly with UFO and extraterrestrial research, particularly through the themes of remote viewing applied to non-human intelligence targets and through the personal experiences of researchers and witnesses. Several prominent remote viewers have described non-human beings, underground bases, and spacecraft in their sessions when tasked with anomalous targets.
Hal Puthoff, co-founder of the SRI remote viewing program, went on to work with the To The Stars Academy and testified before Congress on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), explicitly connecting his decades of parapsychology research to the investigation of craft that appear to demonstrate non-human propulsion principles. The apparent overlap between psychic phenomena, consciousness, and UAP encounters has led some researchers to propose that both represent aspects of a single underlying reality that mainstream science has yet to adequately characterize.
Russell Targ and the philosophy of ESP
Russell Targ, who co-founded the SRI remote viewing program with Hal Puthoff in 1972, described the program's origins as arising from an unexpected chain of events: Puthoff's early research into plant biocommunication brought him into contact with Ingo Swann, who challenged him to apply rigorous physics experiments to human psychic claims. Targ characterized the resulting twenty-year body of research as a direct challenge to logical positivism — the dominant philosophy of science in the twentieth century that maintained that only verifiable, quantifiable phenomena were real. In a 1982 experiment, Targ's team demonstrated that a psychic could correctly forecast changes in the silver commodity market nine consecutive times, which Targ framed as an attempt to falsify ESP that instead demonstrated it.
Targ connected his parapsychological work to the Advaita Vedanta philosophical tradition, which he had studied for a decade under teacher Gangaji. He argued that the Vedantic concept of advaita — "no division" — offered a metaphysical framework consistent with experimental findings on non-local consciousness: if awareness is not divided or bounded by the skull, then remote perception of geographically distant targets is not surprising but expected. He characterized the mind-body dichotomy introduced by Descartes in the seventeenth century as scientifically obsolete given accumulated parapsychological evidence that "the mind is efficacious" — that consciousness acts upon matter in measurable ways.
Hal Puthoff and the SRI program's inception
Hal Puthoff, a physicist at Stanford Research Institute, described his path into parapsychology research as beginning not with psychic phenomena but with plant biocommunication research inspired by polygraph expert Cleve Baxter, who had observed plant responses indistinguishable in waveform from human galvanic skin responses. Puthoff's introduction to remote viewing came when Ingo Swann — a psychic artist — visited his lab after reading Puthoff's research notes, challenged him to apply the same experimental rigor to human subjects, and demonstrated an ability to perturb a sensitive quantum-shielded device at Stanford that Puthoff had assumed would be immune to any external influence.
Joe McMoneagle and remote viewer 001
Joe McMoneagle, designated Remote Viewer 001 in the US military's intelligence program (originally called Grill Flame before being renamed Stargate), described his introduction to the program as originating from a near-death experience in Austria in which he had no heartbeat for an extended period after being poisoned at dinner. Smuggled to a rest home in Munich while military personnel assessed potential brain damage, he recalled experiencing visions of "God's white light" and a certainty that consciousness does not cease at death — experiences that made him a candidate for the psychic program.
McMoneagle was subsequently trained by Robert Monroe — author of Journeys Out of the Body and founder of the Monroe Institute — specifically to initiate and control out-of-body experiences (OBEs) as a complement to remote viewing. The DIA wanted to determine whether intelligence could be collected through OBEs more precisely than through standard remote viewing. McMoneagle described the initiation technique as generating a repetitive vibration starting at the feet, building upward through the body, and eventually producing a separation from the physical body — experienced as fully real and spatially definite.
McMoneagle's operational assignments included tracking a Soviet spy whose only targeting material was a social security number — from which McMoneagle successfully pinpointed the subject's location at Altamont Pass in California, producing a sketch that precisely matched the site — and locating a missing Red October–class submarine. He demonstrated remote viewing to the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence, where a senior senator interrupted the demonstration to declare the work "the work of the devil" before leaving the room — a response McMoneagle cited as illustrative of the political obstacles the program faced throughout its existence.
Russell Targ on precognition and the SRI origin
Russell Targ described the founding of the SRI program as arising from a chain of coincidences beginning with his introduction of an ESP teaching machine at a NASA-funded speculative technology conference attended by Werner von Braun, who was immediately interested in using the device to develop psychic capacities in astronauts following the near-disaster of Apollo 13. Targ connected the lineage of remote viewing to the eighth-century Buddhist text Self Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness by Padma Sambhava, which describes non-local timeless awareness using essentially the same framework as the SRI experimental findings — and attributed the alleged psychic abilities of early SRI subjects including Ingo Swann and Pat Price in part to their Scientology training, which included protocols closely resembling remote viewing.
Targ's commodity market forecasting experiment — nine successive correct silver market calls in 1982 in partnership with psychic Keith Harare — was conducted with an external investor who agreed to absorb losses while the team kept winnings. The team made a quarter of a million dollars, published the results, and appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.