The hardest part of remote viewing is left behind is not a drawing of alien towers, but a trail of skepticism on paper. “They have told us to stay away… And they are not amiable, are they?” The line, which in stories linked to remote viewer Ingo Swann is credited to an American official, continues to spread due to its sounding like a transmission encountered by the far side of the Moon. Even that has had the narrative beneficence of distance: it can never be looked upon unaided, and it has already become as blank a page awaiting an ink.
The U.S. government financed and housed remote viewing in the period between 1977 and 1995 under what was later dubbed Project Stargate and took the “mental perception at a distance” with seriousness that is normally reserved to instruments and sensors. The lunar imagery by Swann, including domes, machinery, and the feeling that people are being followed, suits the cultural fascination with programs withheld and secrets that are kept. However, the declassified record is more interesting as it is read like engineering documentation not “what did someone see” but what does this system output, under constraints, and with repeatable performance?
The remote viewing program is evaluated by CIA in 1995 in response to that question. According to reviewers, there were occasional “hits” beyond chance in some laboratory research, and recurrently this took place with the operational problem the same: intelligence users required details, and remote viewing was more likely to give impressions. The described assessment has been characterized as being “vague and ambiguous,” “inconsistent,” and reliant on “substantial subjective interpretation,” where it has been found that, “in no instance,” had the information informed intelligence operations.
Such a limitation is important to the Moon story as it repackages “Moon warnings” into a genre of production as opposed to actual warning. A book such as that by Swann can be like reconnaissance, but the documentation of the program itself treats the approach as one that wanders in the interpretation. When analysis relies on a judge who determines what should be considered as a “match,” the process is vulnerable to the same failures that afflict any system with weak acceptance criteria: confirmation bias, retrospective fitting and disagreement among assessors. Since the target is so inaccessible as the far side of the moon, there is a growing weakness in those, since there is not much external feedback to measure what it means to be “right.” It is this physical remoteness, this cultural inflection and physical isolation, coupled with the impossibility of falsifying it without specialized equipment, that makes the far side an ideal “target pool.” Secrecy only adds to the effect: the change in budgets or priorities that occurs daily can be re-read, then, as some tacit admissions that something was discovered and concealed. The declassified archive, in practice reveals a more prosaic trend: a program that has been put into test, audited and eventually found to be unreliable to be put into operational use.
Subsequent scholarship attempted to revise the discussion by narrowing requirements and measuring performance. In a follow-up of CIA remote-viewing experiments, 634 participants in a 2023 peer-reviewed follow-up study conducted forced-choice remote viewing experiments and said that results differed by group and test condition, including relations to measures of emotional intelligence in some analyses, in a 2023 follow-up to CIA remote-viewing experiments. There, too, the authors pointed out that statistical anomalies, do not presuppose an operational system, a reflection of the earlier government reproach over the translation of “hits” into useful conclusions.
There is also internal chatter on the government side that puts remote viewing in perspective as ad-hoc and narrow. According to one 1995 declassification Q&A memo by the CIA, the agency had never developed or used parapsychology and that the earlier attempt had never “been a priority effort” and was cut off before it could be institutionalized.
The reason why the “Moon warning” continues to exist is that it makes its home at the intersection of secrecy and an ambivalent approach which is inherent to it. It is interpretive space on which they concur the most in that overlap.
