The Moon has one strange advantage in the modern mythology, and that is its impossibility to check the far side of it. That one engineering limitation, which is verification, is the reason that even the stories of remote viewer Ingo Swann are still propagated, as though they were reconnaissance, despite the fact that the government paperwork was treating remote viewing as an unresolved noisy, biased and repeatable data stream.
In 1977 to 1995, so-called Project Stargate attempted to operationalize the so-called “remote viewing”: a description of invisible objects through the use of an unknown sense. The supposed lunar impressions of Swann, towers and domes and machinery and the disturbing sense of being observed are easily crammed into a culture that has ultimately been conditioned by secrecy to assume that the extraordinary is nothing but a secret. One of the lines attached to these is in keeping with the tone: They have told us to keep off… And they are not amiable, are they?
The tension between believers and skeptics is not the most significant in the declassified record, but rather between narrative vividness and collection standards. The intelligence community had decades of experience in which they had to make decisions with imperfect inputs grainy images, incomplete intercepts, patchy human reporting. Remote viewing, however, came with no consistent method of defining error bars. What or who caused a correct detail? How often did a viewer miss? What were the elements of a session that were signal, and what were the elements of a session that were story-like fill? The method even within the controlled laboratory work did not succeed in separating the impressions of the viewer and the judgment of the evaluator. When shuffled off into actual work, these uncertainties were multiplied: the targets proved complicated, the feedback was slow or missing, and the analysts were inadvertently inclined to discover matches in the loose-knit pictures.
The end-state evaluation of the program brought that gap to focus on. In the 1995 study which was commissioned to examine the usefulness of remote viewing, the reviewers indicated that, some of the studies which were conducted in the laboratory, yielded beyond chance. But the verdict of operations was more decisive: they were vague and ambiguous, inconsistent in nature, and required much interpretation, and in no situation could the information direct intelligence operations.
That conclusion is clumsily positioned against the internal assurance of the program at different locations. A declassified summary of government parapsychology studies retains the aggressive institutional positioning, such as the assertion that remote viewing was put forward as a highly restricted and distinct intelligence gathering instrument. A history of names and sponsors, Gondola Wish, Grill flame, Sun Streak, can be followed, changing hands, changing anticipations, the incessant temptation to exploit the cheap human experiments as a kind of unequal advantage.
Bureaucracy, however, has the tendency to demonstrate the concealed. A procedural and not paranormal one of the stranger signals of institutional seriousness was that remote viewing was formally counted as human-subject experimentation, which has to be signed at the top and renewed with each change of oversight as the program was transferred to it. It was a question of administrative friction, in that the program had to defend itself not in terms of fascination but in terms of deliverables, which were timely, specific, and actionable.
Since Moon claim is like an ideal “target pool” remote, instrumentally mediated and culturally overdetermined, the claim prevails. Ambiguity is a characteristic in that environment. When there is a reliable way of creating interpretative space, the audience could provide the lacking certitude, particularly when there was a place to go in which the lack of corroboration was usual and the imagination was already anticipating it.
