On the evidence of precognition and clairvoyance and why most people still doubt their existence

There is more than sufficient bibliography proving the existence of precognition, clairvoyance, and psi in general, including in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. But why do most people still doubt their existence?

One of the most extraordinary phenomena, which at the same time is very easy to verify is precognition through dreams. All one needs to do is to have a good sleep, and then to take a few minutes to write down all dream details upon waking up. This improves memory retrieval and leaves a useful record. By assiduous practice, one will often notice real-life events that have an extraordinary resemblance to recent dreams, hardly attributable to any coincidence. This phenomenon has been known since ancient times and there are multiple records, reports, and testimonies about it.

From mainstream media, it is easier to hear about aliens than about these natural and common abilities. Much of the research done in these fields is labeled as parapsychology, which is regarded with disdain by mainstream science.

The most shocking and transcendental event of my life was my recent discovery that the US government had been secretly funding a remote viewing scientific research program for more than 20 years (from 1972 to 1995), spending a total of 20 billion dollars. Currently known as Star Gate, it was a succession of multiple secret projects carried out for the US Department of Defense, as well as several other institutions, including the CIA. Currently, all the information is declassified and all reports can be freely downloaded from the CIA’s website. The amount of funding and its extension in time speak for themselves about the success of the program.

The projects were managed by real scientists whose background had little to do with parapsychology. Dr. Russell Targ and Dr. Harold Puthoff who managed the program from 1972 until 1985 were laser physicists and carried out its activities at the prestigious Stanford Research Institute. From 1985 until the end of the program in 1995, it was managed by nuclear physicist Dr. Edwin May at Science Applications International Corporation.

The results of the research performed by Star Gate scientists have been published in multiple books (see the list at the end of this article), and in some prestigious peer-reviewed journals that have nothing to do with parapsychology, some outstanding examples being:

E. Puthoff, R. Targ, Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding, Nature

E. Puthoff, R. Targ, Perceptual channel for information transfer over kilometer distances: Historical perspective and recent research, Proceedings of the IEEE

B. Marwaha, E. C. May, Rethinking extrasensory perception: Toward a multiphasic model of precognition, Sage Open

Star Gate had purely practical goals and there was no funding available for theoretical research. However, the innate scientific curiosity of the people who managed it directly, led them to extra officially carry out some theoretical developments too.

The research covered multiple techniques such as clairvoyance, telepathy, dreaming, OBE, altered states induced through meditation, hypnosis, etc. Traditional divination tools such as psychometry, dowsing, and scrying were also tested and found to help reveal one’s psychic perceptions.

In the first years of the program, the potential of clairvoyance was clearly seen and a strict protocol called controlled remote viewing (CRV) was developed, avoiding the distortions produced by the rational mind. These were called analytic overlay (AOL) and were attributed to the same mechanism responsible for the inexactitude of dream predictions, essentially involving subconscious associations.

Soon it turned out that anyone could be trained to see hidden objects and events even before they happened. It was clearly observed that clairvoyance and precognition were actually different aspects of just one phenomenon. One can see objects and events through his/her unconscious and subconscious regardless of distance and time. That is equivalent to the esoteric concept of the third eye!

It also became clear that while only a few people are extraordinarily gifted at these tasks, most people are quite good, and only very few are not good at all. That means there is a distribution curve similar to the ones that have been identified for any other ability such as say artistic expression.

When the Star Gate information was declassified, some of the program participants began organizing training workshops, established schools to research and teach remote viewing, and wrote manuals and books about it. Consequently, many other people learned the technique, created their own schools, and developed new techniques.

Besides the huge Star Gate contribution to the field of ESP and precognition, there is a lot of research by others, also proving these phenomena. It is not the goal of this article to present an exhaustive compilation of all that work, but it would not be fair to continue without mentioning one particular paper. It was written by well-respected psychologist Daryl Bem in 2011 and caused a huge social and scientific impact, as it was published in the mainstream Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The New York Times published an article about that paper while it was still in press. The paper actually contained data confirming the existence of precognition similar to earlier work by other researchers such as Targ, Puthoff, and May from Star Gate, Stephen Schwartz, Dean Radin, etc.

Currently, there are also phone apps such as Russel Targ’s ESP Trainer (available for iOS) and Michael Ferrier’s Remote Viewing Tournament (available for iOS and Android) that allow anyone to practice remote viewing and to check that this is not a mystic art reserved only for fortune-tellers. With a little practice, most users discover with amazement that both clairvoyance and precognition are real and they are not alone in that as the feedback and statistics provided by other users also reveal spectacular results.

However, many people ignore all that, which is a pity, as we are talking about ULTRATRASCNEDENTAL information, with the potential to change our life and to revolutionize the fundaments of science.

Physicists are currently in a rather confusing impasse about the nature of the universe, and the relationship between relativity and quantum theory, looking for a seemingly very elusive theory of everything. Increasingly difficult-to-understand theories and discoveries are made every day that obviously completely ignore the existence of psi. If everyone accepted the existence of the phenomenon, no doubt many of the issues like those labeled with the phrase "spooky action at a distance" coined by Einstein would no longer seem to be so absurd.

However, it is enough to visit any forum on these topics, such as the Precognition forum on Reddit (which currently has more than 17’000 members), or the Quora topic to see that the vast majority of people either do not believe any of this or do not know whether to believe it or not.

Why is that? Why do psi and its manifestations like remote viewing, precognition, and telepathy seem to be frowned upon in spite of the vast scientific evidence that they are real? One of the reasons is that they are a taboo subject and are generally censored by the official media. If you openly state that you believe it, you are easily branded as weird or wacky.

This might be partly due to ignorance too. One of the great problems of our time is the lack of capacity to process the enormous amount of information that all of us generate and make it accessible to interested users in a digested form. This amount is so immense that sometimes it seems that no one except those who generate it get to know about it.

Scientists are especially aware of this since they know how difficult and time-consuming it is to find all the information related to a certain subject, no matter how narrowly defined it may be. Sometimes the issue is precisely the narrow definition. As there is so much information, we are forced to limit our search to very specific terms, which often means that we do not find exactly what we are looking for because perhaps the work was developed in a slightly different context.

This is one of the greatest difficulties scientists face and it is not only because it slows down any new research, and introduces uncertainty in it. It is also because other scientists often come to learn of many of the important discoveries just by fluke.

Advertising could also make a difference. In fact, in our competitive society overloaded with information, it is crucial. Take for example the millions of extraordinary artists who fall short of global recognition because they cannot afford an extraordinary advertising campaign. In contrast, people with no other talent than selling themselves well are legends and regularly reap large profits. How many times have we marveled at a multimillion-dollar sale of a canvas that has just a few color stripes on? What is the difference between one artist and another? Clearly, the scope of their advertising campaigns.

The subject of psi and the related phenomena have the same issues. The information available is immense, there is a lot of experimental and theoretical work done, and there is plenty of information and tools that allow anyone to experiment with their own psi and convince themselves of its existence.

Unfortunately, there are other psychological factors like deeply rooted skepticism (possibly due to the compromised and fraudulent past of “occult sciences”), conservatism, inertia, etc. which undoubtedly also play a role.

Perhaps the only way all these factors can be counteracted so that society and more importantly, the scientific community could gain awareness of the reality of the phenomenon is through more advertisement and popularization in social media.

Websites

Russel Targ

Paul Smith

Dale Graff

International Remote Viewing Association

Psioneirology

Remote viewing subredit

Precognition subredit

Books

Ingo Swann, Everybody's Guide to Natural ESP

Russell Targ, Jean Houston, Limitless Mind: A Guide to Remote Viewing and Transformation of Consciousness

Russell Targ, The Reality of ESP - A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities