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Wikipedia's article on Remote viewing says,

In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soyster appointed Army Colonel William Johnson to manage the remote viewing unit and evaluate its objective usefulness. Funding dissipated in late 1994 and the program went into decline. The project was transferred out of DIA to the CIA in 1995.

In 1995 the CIA hired the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to perform a retrospective evaluation of the results generated by the Stargate Project. Reviewers included Ray Hyman and Jessica Utts. Utts maintained that there had been a statistically significant positive effect, with some subjects scoring 5%-15% above chance.

Is this true? There was only a 5%-15% effect at the gifted subjects? How many trials were made there?

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Transilvanian
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  • One cited reference for that statement is [An assessment of the evidence for psychic functioning](http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~utts/air2.html) by Julia Utts, which is 404 Page Not Found ... but that report appears to be quoted/reproduced in its entirety (including its Appendices) within the second reference, which is ["An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications](http://www.lfr.org/lfr/csl/library/airreport.pdf) by Mumford, Rose and Goslin – ChrisW Sep 14 '13 at 18:45
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    IMO I should vote to reopen. I don't think I can answer it, because I don't think it's clear how or even whether "5%-15% above chance" can be summarized from the cited article[s], etc. But I think that the question itself is clear: it's no more or less than an "is this true, and what is the evidence?" question about a published claim. – ChrisW Sep 14 '13 at 19:56
  • What a heavily-edited article that is. Are all Wikipedia articles like that?! Anyway, [WikiBlame](http://wikipedia.ramselehof.de/wikiblame.php) shows that the `subjects scoring 5%-15% above chance` text fragment comes from [Revision as of 23:42, 10 February 2007](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Remote_viewing&diff=107190820&oldid=106881235). Does WikiPedia let you query that user (username 'Puddytang'), to ask how they derived that number from their source material? – ChrisW Sep 14 '13 at 20:10
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    @ChrisW It does. You can ask at their [Talk page](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Puddytang). You can do this without an account, too, but it will reveal your IP address. The user is not very active, but [edited most recently on August 22](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Puddytang), so maybe they'll respond. –  Sep 14 '13 at 21:46
  • I'm still not clear if the question is "Does remote viewing work to give results at >5% above chance?" or "Were the results of THIS REPORT into THESE TESTS up to 15% above chance?" The former calls for all available evidence to be summarised, the latter for one disputed and unreproduced report to be quoted. – Oddthinking Sep 15 '13 at 05:54
  • @ChrisW there was probably an editing war, with "believers" removing anything that is inconsistent with their world view only to have it re-added later. – jwenting Sep 15 '13 at 07:28
  • @Oddthinking: well, quoting a single paper without putting it into the context of the other papers on the subject would be meaningless in any case. I think whatever the intention of the OP, a good answer would summarize a wider range of experiments than just that specific one. – nico Sep 15 '13 at 07:47
  • @Oddthinking I think that Julia Utts' report was a meta-analysis of tests by several institutions, to determine experiments' repeatability. Although you edited the title to remove "SRI" and "SAIC", IMO an answer should at least ('necessary, although not necessarily sufficient') include an analysis of that data, and/or of the reports cited in Wikipedia. – ChrisW Sep 15 '13 at 08:42
  • @ChrisW: Ok. (I removed SRI and SAIC because they were neither defined nor referenced in the question.) – Oddthinking Sep 15 '13 at 13:27
  • Hy! If I understand right, there were made 20.000 of trials at SRI. http://www.lfr.org/lfr/csl/library/airreport.pdf page 35: "all forced choice experiments at SRI resulted in a similar effect size of .052" – Transilvanian Sep 17 '13 at 16:22
  • what means this small effect size for 20k trials? – Transilvanian Sep 17 '13 at 16:46
  • Hy again! "Although the findings of the National Research Council (NRC) were predominantly negative with regard to a range of paranormal phenomena, work on remote viewing has continued under the auspices of various government programs" What were these NRC findings? http://www.lfr.org/lfr/csl/library/airreport.pdf – Transilvanian Sep 18 '13 at 14:57

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