We would have you go to the Moon, and tell us what you see there. The line is found in subsequent retellings of remote viewer Ingo Swann, and has the same alluring assumption as a good engineering brief, a target, a method and a promise of an actionable outcome.
The umbrella project, Project Stargate, including a number of U.S. government-funded remote-viewing projects, operated well into the late Cold War period, and was active between 1977 and 1995. What has remained in its permanent pop-culture afterimage is not a statistical table or a laboratory procedure, but a brochure of the moon: towers and domes across the other side, machinery in silent scenery, the disturbing feeling that one is, in turn, being looked at. The image continues to exist due to what appears to be the purpose of the hidden hemisphere of the Moon, that it is designed to be projected: remote, hard to confirm via common experience, and surrounded by histories of secrets.
What alters the atmosphere is the paper work. In the 1995 review of the remote viewing program, its reviewers distinguished two questions which conspiracy-laden retellings tend to confuse: whether laboratory experiments occasionally made so-called “hits” better than chance and whether any of that were useful intelligence. The working decision is direct. Remote-viewing findings were characterized as “incoherent and vague,” “inconsistent,” and highly subjective, and never were the information used to inform intelligence operations. To an engineering-minded reader, that is a well-known failure mode: a signal which cannot be calibrated, repeated or productised.
This is the limit to which the moon warning stories border. The description by Swann is presented in the manner of reconnaissance whereas the declassified criticism in the form of quality control: output that can not with confidence be converted into a decision. What explains this gap is why remote viewing as a methodology is prone to produce narratives that are supposed to be specific and whose structures are elastic. A dome, a bridge, a tower, a feeling of hostility it is very easy to create vivid motifs, but impossible to test them as coordinates. They also have little trouble being retrofitted to any subsequent context that a reader may already find plausible.
Subsequent scholarly follow-ups attempted to contract the machinery. In an article which details a replication-style design, it was found that there were mixed results between participant groups and that performance could be in part predicted by measures related to the emotional processing, and that in one group, “hits in the RV experiments” were found to be partially predicted by EI measures. Even the framing of the study is important: The article discusses remote viewing as a problem of statistical anomalies-effects that can occur when using limited protocols-as opposed to an operational sensor. That difference corresponds to a previous finding of the CIA that even the suggestive effects in the laboratory had not been turned into a working tool.
The second boundary is that of the Moon. The Apollo landings created an unusually well-verifiable apparentiary footprint in the form of sprawling evidence including high-definition Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shots of landing equipment and astronaut tracks. That is, the Moon, as well as being a canvas on which instrumentation has again and again turned claims into records that are subject to inspection, is the canvas of hidden-base fantasies as well.
The difference between those stories that grow in interpretive space, and those that reduce it, explains why the “Moon warning” is culturally persistent and institutionally invalid. The Stargate files maintain a government experiment just beyond the measurement threshold, and they also chronicle the juncture of a tempting concept unsurviving the most pragmatic examination: generating information which would be believed when it was needed.
