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I | [ | | | | | | | | | l | | | | | cPYRGHT UNCLASSIFIED Approved For Release 2000/08/09 : CIA-RDP96-00792R00 PUTHOFF AND TARG: PERCEPTUAL CHANNEL FOR INFORMATION TRANSFER IV. CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING TIME If the authors may be forgiven a personal note, we wish to express that this section deals with observations that we have been reluctant to publish because of their striking apparent in- compatibility with existing concepts. The motivating factor for presenting the data at this time is the ethical consideration that theorists endeavoring to develop models for paranormal functioning should be apprised of all the observable data if their efforts to arrive at a comprehensive and correct descrip- tion are to be successful. During the course of the experimentation in remote viewing (Section HI), subjects occasionally volunteered the informa- tion that they had been thinking about their forthcoming par- ticipation in a remote-viewing experiment and had an image come to them as to what the target location was to be. On these occasions, the information was given only to the experi- menter remaining at SRI with the subject and was unknown to the outbound experimenter until completion of the experi- ment. Two of these contributions were among the most accurate descriptions turned in during those experiments. Since the target location had not yet been selected when the subject communicated his perceptions about the target, we found the data difficult to contend with. We offer these spontaneous occurrences not as proof of pre- cognitive perception, but rather as the motivation that led us to do further work in this field. On the basis of this firsthand evidence, together with the copious literature describing years of precognition experiments carried out in various other labo- ratories, we decided to determine whether a subject could per- form a perceptual task that required both spatial and temporal remote viewing. It is well known and recently has been widely discussed that nothing in the fundamental laws of physics forbids the appar- ent transmission of information from the future to the present (discussed further in Section V). Furthermore, there is a gen- eral dictum that “in physical law, everything that is not forbid- den, is required” [61]. With this in mind, we set out to con- duct very well-controlled experiments to determine whether we could deliberately design and execute experiments for the sole purpose of observing precognition under laboratory conditions. The experimental protocol was identical to that followed in previous remote-viewing experiments with but one exception. The exception was that the subject was required to describe the remote location during a 15-min period beginning 20 min before the target was selected-and 35 min before the outbound experimenter was to arrive at the target location. In detail, as shown in Table IX, each day at ten o’clock one of the experimenters would leave SRI with a stack of ten sealed envelopes from a larger pool and randomized daily, con- taining traveling instructions that had been prepared, but that were unknown to the two experimenters remaining with the subject. The subject for this experiment was Hella Hammid (S4) who participated in the nine-experiment series replicating the original Price work described earlier. The traveling experi- menter was to drive continuously from 10:00 until 10:30 be- fore selecting his destination with a random number generator. (The motivation for continuous motion was our observation that objects and persons in rapid motion are not generally seen in the remote-viewing mode of perception, and we wished the traveler to be a poor target until he reached his target site.) At the end of 30 min of driving, the traveling experimenter gener- TABLE IX EXPERIMENTAL PROTOCOL: PRECOGNITIVE REMOTE VIEWING Time A Schedule Experimenter/Subject Activity Outbound experimenter leaves with 10 envelopes (containing target locations) and random number generator; begins half-hour drive Experimentera remaining with subject in the laboratory elicit from subject e description of where outbound experimenter will be from 10:45-11:00 Subject responae completed, at which time Laboratory part of experiment 1s over Outbound experimenter obtains random number from a random number generator, counts down to associated envelope, and proceeds to target location indicated Outbound experimenter remains at target Location for 15 minutes (10:45-11:00) Fig. 14. Subject Hammid (S4) described “some kind of congealing tar, or maybe an area of condensed lava ... that has oozed out to fill up some kind of boundaries.” ated a random digit from 0 to 9 with a Texas Instruments SR-51 random number generator; while still in motion, he counted down that number of envelopes and proceeded di- rectly to the target location so as to arrive there by 10:45. He remained at the target site until 11:00, at which time he re- turned to the laboratory, showed his chosen target name toa security guard, and entered the experimental room. During the same period, the protocol in the laboratory was as follows. At 10:10, the subject was asked to begin a descrip- tion of the place to which the experimenter would go 35 min hence, The subject then generated a tape-recorded description and associated drawings from 10:10 to 10:25, at which time her part in the experiment was ended. Her description was thus entirely concluded 5 min before the beginning of the tar- get selection procedure. Four such experiments were carried out. Each of them ap- peared to be successful, an evaluation later verified in blind judging without error by three judges. We will briefly sum- marize the four experiments below. The first target, the Palo Alto Yacht Harbor, consisted en- tirely of mud flats because of an extremely low tide (see Fig. 14). Appropriately, the entire transcript of the subject per- tained to “some kind of congealing tar, or maybe an area of condensed lava. It looks like the whole area is covered with some kind of wrinkled elephant skin that has oozed out to fill up some kind of boundaries where (the outbound experi- menter) is standing.’’ Because of the lack of water, the dock where the remote experimenter was standing was in fact rest- ing directly on the mud.