Remote viewing: what it is, why it is tied to the God Helmet, and how to test it

Remote viewing is the claimed ability to describe a hidden target (a picture, a place or a future event) without any normal sensory route to it. It is one of the effects people most often link with the God Helmet. Michael Persinger's laboratory tested the former government remote viewer Ingo Swann and the psychic Sean Harribance with weak magnetic fields, and Todd Murphy sells Shakti and Shiva sessions designed for psi. The US government paid for remote-viewing research from 1972 to 1995.

This article sets out how remote viewing sessions work, what the God Helmet literature claims, what the government programmes found, where the scientific debate stands, and how to run an honest trial with this helmet. The short version: laboratory remote viewing produced effects that critics and supporters agree are hard to explain as chance, but they come mostly from one research group, were never independently replicated under tight controls, and the God Helmet link rests on one-subject studies from one lab.

Related documents:

• HISTORY.md: the full programme history (CIA–SRI, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK, STAR GATE, the 1995 AIR review)
• RESEARCH.md: the Persinger/Koren laboratory record and the psi research summary
• EXPERIMENTS.md: the Trials tab, target pools, judging, statistics and pre-registration
• GUIDES.md: the guided sessions, including CRV, ARV and ganzfeld-style trials
• SAFETY.md: exposure limits and who should not use the helmet
• Sensed presence and Out-of-body experiences: the two other effect articles

How to read this article

The evidence words are the ones used across the project:

Nothing about remote viewing itself is Established: Replicated by independent groups. in this sense. The word applies only to some negative findings, such as the inconsistent judging in ARV and the absence of a field effect in independent God Helmet tests.

Military and intelligence material is described as documentary history only. Nothing here is guidance for observing or influencing other people.

What remote viewing is

The term was coined at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the early 1970s, where the physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff tested Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Hella Hammid and others. Later protocols differ in how the target is chosen, how the viewer responds and how the response is scored. They all share three parts:

1. A hidden target, chosen at random after the viewer has been isolated, so that no one with the viewer knows it.
2. A free response: the viewer talks, writes and sketches impressions, usually for 15 to 30 minutes.
3. Blind judging: someone who does not know the target compares the response with the real target and several decoys.

The third part is what makes it a test. Any description matches some picture loosely; the question is whether it matches the real target better than the decoys more often than chance.

Protocols in brief

CRV in general terms. The declassified 1985 working paper splits a session into six stages: a first spontaneous pen mark and a gut reaction; sensory words (colours, textures, temperatures, sounds); dimensions and sketches; a matrix that separates kinds of data; queries on single words; and three-dimensional modelling (CRV working paper 1985). Its core idea is to keep raw impressions apart from named guesses, which it calls "analytic overlay". EXPERIMENTS.md gives the stage table and the session classes. No controlled study shows that the CRV structure improves accuracy (Claim: Stated by an author, vendor or programme, without published supporting data.).

Judging and scoring. Two methods dominate:

• Ranking. The judge ranks every picture in the set against the response, 1 being the best match. A "hit" is the target ranked first; with 5 pictures, chance is 20 %. The mean rank and a standardised rank score use all the information.
• Rating. The judge scores the match on a fixed scale (for example 0–7), or scores each element of the response against a list of target features. SRI's 1983 "fuzzy set" form is an example; it was not validated (SRI 1983).

Effect size. Utts's figure, used throughout this article, is the standardised rank score per trial. With 5-picture sets, an effect size of 0.2 corresponds to a mean target rank of about 2.72 instead of the chance value of 3 (Utts 1995). It is a small effect: most sessions are not hits.

Why it is linked to the God Helmet

Persinger's work with Ingo Swann (1998–2002)

Ingo Swann, an artist and the best-known SRI subject, visited Persinger's laboratory at Laurentian University in August 1998. Two papers followed.

• Swann under rotating fields. Swann received one 30-minute exposure to circumcerebral magnetic fields: eight solenoids in a ring around the head, the field stepping counter-clockwise, in six 5-minute configurations (three burst-firing, three frequency-modulated "Thomas" patterns, about 2–5 µT). The abstract says the fields "significantly altered his subjective experiences". In remote-viewing trials on the following days, the proportion of unusual 7 Hz spike-and-slow-wave EEG activity over the occipital lobes correlated with rated accuracy (rho = .50). MRI and neuropsychological tests showed an unusual right parieto-occipital organisation (Persinger, Roll, Tiller, Koren & Cook 2002). One subject, no sham session, and the accuracy ratings and EEG came from the same team (Single lab: Reported by one laboratory or one group and its close collaborators, with no independent replication.).
• Fields around the target. In a pilot, the sealed target photographs in another room were surrounded by weak fields (under 20 nT over most of the area). Patterns generated under Windows, which the authors say phase-modulated the waveform, were followed by a marked fall in Swann's accuracy; the same nominal patterns generated under DOS were not (Koren & Persinger 2002). This is a pilot with one subject (Single lab: Reported by one laboratory or one group and its close collaborators, with no independent replication.). It is also the origin of the lab's claim that timing jitter destroys the effect, which became central to the later replication dispute (HISTORY.md).

In a public lecture Persinger presented Swann as someone who "helped develop the phenomenon of remote viewing" (3pdDtH4CvTY at 8:32) and described the target photographs sitting in envelopes in another room (12:57).

Persinger and Sean Harribance

Sean Harribance, a psychic, reported lifelong "flashes of images" of hidden objects and of personal details of strangers.

• 2002 SPECT study. The specificity of his descriptions of target pictures of people correlated with the proportion of occipital alpha activity. SPECT and EEG suggested more activity in the right parietal and occipital regions. Weak fields patterned like hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP), applied over his right temporoparietal region, evoked sensed presences on his left side (Roll, Persinger, Webster, Tiller & Cook 2002) (Single lab: Reported by one laboratory or one group and its close collaborators, with no independent replication., one subject).
• 2010 retelling. Persinger later reported 22 presence or vision button presses during the LTP pattern against 5–12 for other patterns, with a 6:1 left-side bias. A 20-second rotation of the same pattern lowered his alpha rhythm to 25–30 % of baseline and his rated accuracy by about 20 % (Persinger 2010). The number and length of trials are not given (Single lab: Reported by one laboratory or one group and its close collaborators, with no independent replication.).
• EEG signature. A later sLORETA analysis of his recorded EEG found 20–30 Hz power in the right parahippocampal region during readings (Persinger & Saroka 2012). Again one subject.

Note that in the Harribance work the fields mostly lowered accuracy or produced presences; none of these papers shows fields improving psi performance.

Geomagnetic and sidereal-time claims

Persinger argued for decades that psi experiences and performance track geomagnetic activity. In the same lecture he says such experiences usually happen "when the geomagnetic activity is less intense" (3pdDtH4CvTY at 5:41).

• Dream ESP. Persinger and Krippner (1989) reported that the Maimonides dream sessions scored best on geomagnetically quiet nights. We have seen this only in secondary sources (Unverified: Nobody has tested it, or we could not check the source.) (Psi Encyclopedia: Persinger).
• Inside the programme. A 1984 study for the Army correlated scored sessions with solar, geomagnetic and local ELF data and cited Persinger's papers as part of its rationale. It called itself a pilot (Adams & Puthoff 1984) (Single lab: Reported by one laboratory or one group and its close collaborators, with no independent replication.).
• Sidereal time. Spottiswoode reported much larger effect sizes near 13.5 h local sidereal time in a post-hoc analysis of free-response trials (Spottiswoode 1997, Journal of Scientific Exploration 11(2)). No independent replication is known (Single lab: Reported by one laboratory or one group and its close collaborators, with no independent replication.).

The app logs Kp, ap and local sidereal time with every trial as exploratory variables. Do not schedule sessions by them (RESEARCH.md).

Murphy's Shakti and Shiva psi sessions

Todd Murphy, who sells the 8-coil Shakti and the Shiva replica of Persinger's "Octopus" ring, describes psi configurations of his own.

• The chirp ring. In his lecture on psychic skills, Murphy describes a counter-clockwise chirp signal around the ring with the time over each coil growing from 10 to 20 ms, and places psi in the right hemisphere (tmC1174POpA; notes in RESEARCH.md) (Claim: Stated by an author, vendor or programme, without published supporting data.).
• Shakti remote-viewing design. His Shakti pages propose a modulated 40 Hz signal over the occipital lobes, citing the occipital 7 Hz finding in Swann. The page itself says this signal "has not been tested in practice for enhancement of remote viewing skills" (Murphy: Shakti remote viewing) (Unverified: Nobody has tested it, or we could not check the source.).
• Telepathy design. A second page proposes the same signal over the frontal lobes, then the occipital lobes (Murphy: psychic skills), and states that none of its procedures has been tested (Unverified: Nobody has tested it, or we could not check the source.).

What the independent evidence says

No laboratory outside Persinger's has tested whether weak rotating fields change remote-viewing accuracy. Independent double-blind tests of God-Helmet-type fields on experience found no field effect: what people reported tracked suggestibility and absorption, not the field (Granqvist et al. 2005; Gendle & McGrath 2012). The God Helmet connection to remote viewing therefore rests on two one-subject papers from one lab, plus vendor designs that the vendor says are untested.

Government programmes in brief

The full record, with document links, is in HISTORY.md. In outline:

The 1995 review by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) for the CIA found that laboratory hits exceeded chance but could not be separated from the reuse of the same viewers, targets and judge. Operational reports were "inconsistent, inaccurate with regard to specifics", and "in no case had the information provided ever been used to guide intelligence operations" (AIR 1995). Earlier, the National Research Council had called the case for remote viewing "virtually nonexistent" (NRC 1988). The CIA put the STAR GATE files online in its CREST database in 2017 (Smithsonian 2017).

The link to this project is personal rather than technical: Swann, the developer of CRV, was the subject of Persinger's study. No document shows that God-Helmet-type fields were used in any government programme (HISTORY.md).

The scientific debate

The early SRI work and Marks & Kammann

Targ and Puthoff published their first results in Nature in 1974, with an editorial explaining why the journal printed a paper its referees had doubts about (Targ & Puthoff 1974). The psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann tried to repeat the outbound experiments in New Zealand and failed. Looking at SRI's transcripts, they found cues a judge could use to put them in order without any psi: references to dates and to earlier sessions. Because the sessions ran in a known order, such cues could let a judge match transcripts to sites. Their repeats "do not verify" SRI's conclusions (Marks & Kammann 1978). Tart, Puthoff and Targ re-judged edited transcripts and reported that the result survived (Nature 284:191, 1980); Marks and Kammann were not persuaded. The episode set the standard rule: clean transcripts, random target order and judges who know nothing about the sequence.

Utts versus Hyman (1995)

The AIR review commissioned two outside assessments.

• Jessica Utts, a statistician, concluded that psychic functioning "has been well established". She reported effect sizes of 0.209 over 770 SRI sessions and 0.230 over 455 SAIC sessions, and argued that the consistency across laboratories (including ganzfeld work) ruled out chance (Utts 1995).
• Ray Hyman, a psychologist, agreed the SAIC effects were "too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes". He argued that this does not show a paranormal cause: one person, Edwin May, was the sole judge of all the SAIC free-response experiments; the same small group of viewers and targets was reused; and a real phenomenon would need boundary conditions and independent replication with new viewers, pools and judges (Hyman 1995).

Their disagreement is less about the numbers than about what would count as proof. Both accepted that the lab data were not chance. Utts weighed the consistency; Hyman weighed the dependence on one group and the lack of a theory that predicts when the effect should appear. Later re-examinations sided with the call for caution: Wiseman and Milton found possible leakage routes in SAIC's Experiment One, which AIR had used as its worked example, and the SAIC team gave several different accounts of its procedure when asked (Wiseman & Milton 1998; reply to May 1999).

Known weak points

Meta-analyses and replications since 1995

• A proponent meta-analysis. Tressoldi and Katz pooled 36 remote-viewing studies (40 effect sizes) from 1974 to 2022. They report an average effect size of .34 after excluding outliers, no signs of publication bias and a minimal decline, and conclude that remote viewing outperforms other ESP protocols (Tressoldi & Katz 2023) (Claim: Stated by an author, vendor or programme, without published supporting data.; the pooled studies are mostly unregistered, and many come from a few groups).
• A pre-registered test. In a pre-registered study at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit, 44 experienced remote viewers produced 10 correct matches (23 %, chance 25 %) (Lyke, KPU 1055) (Single lab: Reported by one laboratory or one group and its close collaborators, with no independent replication., null).
• ARV re-judged. When nine new judges re-scored 86 completed ARV trials, all nine agreed on only 6.9 % of them, and the new judges averaged 51.5 % correct against 65 % for the original judges. An applied currency-trading project lost $52,186 (Katz et al. 2021). The earlier positive ARV series, such as Targ's 1982 silver-futures forecasts (9 of 9, Claim: Stated by an author, vendor or programme, without published supporting data.) and 7 of 7 Dow Jones predictions by students (Smith, Laham & Moddel 2010), were small and not judged blind.
• Pre-registration in general. In the Koestler Unit's registry, 16 % of pre-registered confirmatory hypotheses were supported, against 46.6 % in non-registered papers of the same period (Wiseman & Watt 2026). A large pre-registered multi-lab replication of Bem's precognition design found 49.89 % against 50 % chance over 37,836 trials (Kekecs et al. 2023).
• The wider argument. A 2018 review in American Psychologist argued that the psi evidence is comparable to that for accepted psychological effects (Cardeña 2018); a reply argued that the claims conflict with established physics and cannot be right (Reber & Alcock 2020).

Where this leaves things. The SRI/SAIC laboratory effect is Single lab: Reported by one laboratory or one group and its close collaborators, with no independent replication.. Independent, pre-registered tests with experienced viewers have not reproduced it. ARV judging is unreliable (Established: Replicated by independent groups. as a methodological finding). No brain marker of remote viewing has been validated; SAIC's own MEG and EEG searches found nothing (AIR 1995; BRAIN_VIEW.md).

Videos

All links were checked for title, channel and length. Upload years are approximate where YouTube shows only an age; recording dates come from the video descriptions. Timestamps link to chapter markers or to transcript lines we checked. Speakers in the first three groups are proponents or insiders; treat their accounts as claims or anecdotes.

Programme insiders

Scientists and statisticians

Persinger lab and Murphy

Documentary

Sceptics

We found no verifiable upload of the 1995 ABC Nightline segment on STAR GATE, so it is not listed.

Reading list and primary sources

Primary papers and reports

• Targ R, Puthoff H (1974). Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding. Nature 251:602–607 (Nature; CIA reading room copy).
• Marks D, Kammann R (1978). Information transmission in remote viewing experiments. Nature 274:680–681 (Nature).
• Kress K (1977). Parapsychology in intelligence: a personal review (text).
• Mumford M, Rose A, Goslin D (1995). An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications. AIR (PDF), with Utts 1995 and Hyman 1995.
• Puthoff H (1996). CIA-initiated remote viewing at Stanford Research Institute (text).
• Wiseman R, Milton J (1998). Experiment One of the SAIC remote viewing program: a critical re-evaluation. Journal of Parapsychology 62:297–308 (repository).
• Roll WG, Persinger MA, Webster DL, Tiller SG, Cook CM (2002). Neurobehavioral and neurometabolic (SPECT) correlates of paranormal information. International Journal of Neuroscience 112:197–224 (PubMed).
• Persinger MA, Roll WG, Tiller SG, Koren SA, Cook CM (2002). Remote viewing with the artist Ingo Swann. Perceptual and Motor Skills 94:927–949 (PubMed).
• Koren SA, Persinger MA (2002). Possible disruption of remote viewing by complex weak magnetic fields around the stimulus site. Perceptual and Motor Skills 95:989–998 (PubMed).
• Persinger MA (2010). The Harribance effect as pervasive out-of-body experiences. NeuroQuantology 8:444–465 (archived PDF).
• Katz DL et al. (2021). ARV judging and outcomes (KPU 1034).
• Tressoldi P, Katz DL (2023). Remote viewing: a 1974–2022 systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Scientific Exploration 37:467–489 (JSE).

Books (not linked; most are in print)

• Targ R, Puthoff H. Mind-Reach (1977): the SRI account by its authors.
• Marks D, Kammann R. The Psychology of the Psychic (1980; 2nd ed. by Marks, 2000): the sceptical account of the SRI work.
• McMoneagle J. Mind Trek (1993): a viewer's memoir (Anecdote: Personal reports, testimonials and single cases.).
• Schnabel J. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies (1997): journalist's history.
• Smith PH. Reading the Enemy's Mind (2005): an insider's history of the Army unit.
• May EC, Marwaha SB (eds). The Star Gate Archives (2018 onwards): the SRI/SAIC research reports, edited by the programme's research director.

Trying it with this helmet

Programs

None of these has been shown to change remote-viewing accuracy. They let you test the claims, blind and against sham.

Read SAFETY.md first. These programs are not for anyone with epilepsy or a seizure history; stop on headache, nausea or distress.

Guides

• Photo-target trial (free response): the standard evidential trial.
• CRV guided session (Stages I–VI) and CRV training plan: CRV as a response format, with an optional blinded helmet arm.
• Extended remote viewing (ERV) with blinded arms: long relaxation sessions with real and sham arms.
• Psi trial with covariates (ganzfeld-style): belief and state measures, relaxation and eyes-covered mentation.
• Outbound beacon (live target, two people): SRI's original design, adapted.
• ARV binary prediction: for practice only; never for money or decisions about people.
• SRV-style basic session, Daily ESP practice (McMoneagle exercises) and Ten-choice trainer: practice tasks, not evidence.

Running a proper trial

EXPERIMENTS.md has the full method. The essentials:

1. Pre-register. Before the first trial, write down the hypothesis, the one primary outcome (for example first-place hits against chance, or real against sham), the number of trials, the set size and who judges. Date it and, if you can, post it publicly.
2. Have someone else build the picture pool in Trials → Picture pool: sets of 4 or 5 pictures of the same size, as different as possible within a set, many sets drawn with replacement. Import it without looking (never press Show pictures yourself) and note the pool fingerprint.
3. Create the trial in Trials: mode "Remote viewing", a stimulation program, Blind ticked. The helmet's hardware random generator picks the set, the target and real or sham, and shows a SHA-256 commitment before you start.
4. Respond during or after the stimulation: shapes, colours, textures, sketches; raw impressions rather than names. Then lock the response.
5. Judge blind. Better than judging yourself: hand the phone to someone who does not know the target, the condition or the viewer. Remove dates and references to other trials from the response first. Every picture gets a different rank.
6. Reveal. The app checks the commitment, the pool and the locked response. Aborted trials stay in the list.
7. Analyse once, at the planned number of trials. Everything other than your primary outcome (Kp, sidereal time, per-program results) is exploratory.

How many trials

From EXPERIMENTS.md, for 80 % power at one-sided α = .05:

Testing the helmet's contribution (real against sham) needs more still, because you are looking for a difference between two small effects. A personal series of 20 or 30 trials is a pilot: at the SRI/SAIC level it will usually not reach significance even if the effect is real, and a "significant" short series is often luck.

Honest expectations

• Expect chance. The best-controlled recent tests of experienced viewers found chance results. Most people's series will look like chance.
• Impressions are not evidence. Vivid imagery is common with relaxation, sensory reduction and suggestion, with or without a field. Only blind ranking against decoys counts.
• The helmet arm is the real question. If you see an effect, the informative test is whether it differs between real and sham sessions that you could not tell apart. Record your guess of the condition after each session.
• Report everything. Nulls are useful. Export the raw trial file and keep it with your pre-registration.