Follow-up on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) remote viewing experiments
Author
Escolà-Gascón, Álex
Houran, James
Dagnall, Neil
Drinkwater, Kenneth
Denovan, Andrew
Other authors
Universitat Ramon Llull. Facultat de Comunicació i Relacions Internacionals Blanquerna
Publication date
2023-05-03Abstract
Objectives: Since 1972, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) commissioned several research programs on remote viewing (RV) that were progressively declassified from 1995 to 2003. The main objectives of this research were to statistically replicate the original findings and address the question: What are the underlying cognitive mechanisms involved in RV? The research focused on emotional intelligence (EI) theory and intuitive information processing as possible hypothetical mechanisms.
Methods: We used a quasi-experimental design with new statistical control techniques based on structural equation modeling, analysis of invariance, and forced-choice experiments to accurately objectify results. We measured emotional intelligence with the Mayer—Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test. A total of 347 participants who were non believers in psychic experiences completed an RV experiment using targets based on location coordinates. A total of 287 participants reported beliefs in psychic experiences and completed another RV experiment using targets based on images of places. Moreover, we divided the total sample into further subsamples for the purpose of replicating the findings and also used different thresholds on standard deviations to test for variation in effect sizes. The hit rates on the psi-RV task were contrasted with the estimated chance. Results: The results of our first group analysis were non significant, but the analysis applied to the second group produced significant RV-related effects corresponding to
the positive influence of EI (i.e., hits in the RV experiments were 19.5% predicted from EI) with small to moderate effect sizes (between 0. 457 and 0.853).
Conclusions: These findings have profound implications for a new hypothesis of anomalous cognitions relative to RV protocols. Emotions perceived during RV sessions may play an important role in the production of anomalous cognitions. We propose the Production-Identification-Comprehension (PIC) emotional model as a function of behavior that could enhance VR test success.
Document Type
Article
Document version
Published version
Language
English
Subject (CDU)
1 - Philosophy. Psychology
Keywords
Cognicions anòmales
Agència Central d'Inteligència
Intel·ligència emocional
Visualització remota
Pages
20 p.
Publisher
Wiley Online Library
Is part of
Brain and behavior, vol. 13, núm. 6, 2023
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
Rights
© L'autor/a
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/