Declassified

SRI research examined targets located hundreds or thousands of kilometers from viewers. Researchers wanted to know whether geographical distance affected whatever phenomenon they believed they were observing. The concept is experimentally testable: have another person randomly travel somewhere unknown to the viewer, record impressions at a predetermined time, timestamp everything and compare only afterward.

Why this one comes first: not because it can be shown to work paranormally, but because you can test it immediately and get a result you didn't consciously know beforehand. It combines several of the best ideas in this collection (Focus 10, Focus 12, remote viewing, sensory decomposition, AOL control and blinding) without requiring you to accept any metaphysical explanation beforehand.

The protocol. Have someone else do the setup so you're genuinely blind:

Step 1. Have them privately choose one photograph from a pool of 20 dramatically different locations (waterfall, skyscraper, desert, bridge, snowy mountain, stadium, etc.). You must not see the pool or know which picture was selected.

Step 2. Sit somewhere quiet, close your eyes, take several slow breaths, and spend about 5 minutes reaching the relaxed Focus-10-style state: body deeply relaxed, mind awake.

Step 3. Don't try to identify the place. That's the trick. For about 10 minutes, write only primitive impressions: hot/cold, wet/dry, bright/dark, natural/artificial, open/enclosed, colors, textures, vertical/horizontal, movement, sounds, shapes.

Step 4. If your brain suddenly announces "It's the Eiffel Tower!", write AOL: Eiffel Tower off to the side and immediately return to raw sensations. That's the CRV concept of analytical overlay.

Step 5. Make a quick sketch. Don't make it pretty. Draw whatever geometry or spatial relationships keep appearing.

Step 6. Stop completely before seeing the target. Photograph or timestamp your notes.

Step 7. Only then have the other person reveal the photograph.

Step 8. Compare your specific recorded impressions, not vague similarities. Count obvious misses just as seriously as hits.

What would be genuinely noteworthy: suppose before seeing anything you independently wrote "huge vertical structure, metallic, cold, open space underneath, water nearby, repeating triangular geometry," drew something resembling a tower, and then the concealed photograph was the Golden Gate Bridge. Don't immediately declare ESP. Repeat the experiment. One spectacular match can occur by coincidence; repeated blinded performance is where this becomes interesting.

Cleaner version: don't have your helper personally select the picture. Have them use a random-number generator to select 1–20 from a previously prepared numbered target pool. That removes unconscious target selection.

If the first result is startling: don't change the procedure on trial two. Repeat exactly the same protocol. That's when the experiment starts becoming interesting rather than merely an experience.

Focus 10 is the fundamental Gateway altered state. The objective is to place the physical body into an extremely relaxed, almost sleep-like condition while consciousness remains awake. The participant progressively relaxes the body while deliberately maintaining awareness. In ordinary life this can be useful for meditation, visualization, sleep preparation and stress reduction. Gateway treats Focus 10 as something more important: a launching platform from which consciousness can supposedly operate with less interference from normal physical sensory input.

Before deeper Gateway exercises, participants visualize a substantial container and mentally place worries, fears, physical concerns, unfinished business and distracting thoughts inside it. The lid is closed and those concerns are temporarily left behind. Psychologically, this resembles deliberate compartmentalization. Rather than fighting intrusive thoughts, you acknowledge them and decide that they don't require attention during the upcoming session. It is one of Gateway's simplest and most immediately useful techniques.

Gateway combines controlled breathing with prolonged humming or vocal tones. The participant inhales deeply and produces sustained sounds during exhalation while concentrating upon vibrations through the chest, throat and head. Gateway assigns broader energetic significance to this procedure. A more conservative interpretation is that breathing, prolonged exhalation, vibration and focused attention combine to produce a significant change in subjective arousal and bodily awareness.

Gateway teaches participants to visualize an energy field completely surrounding their physical body. This Resonant Energy Balloon, or REBAL, is treated as both a stabilizing and protective field during altered-state exploration. There is no established scientific evidence that such a literal protective energy shell exists. Psychologically, however, repeatedly associating a vivid surrounding sphere with safety, concentration and calmness could make it a powerful mental-state cue.

This technique attempts to separate fears and negative emotions from the circumstances producing them. The participant identifies a fear, examines its emotional component and imagines releasing that charge. A practical interpretation is learning to distinguish reality from the catastrophic narrative that the mind builds around reality. The technique can therefore function as a method for examining emotional reactions without allowing those reactions to dominate reasoning.

After Focus 10 comes Focus 12, which Gateway describes as expanded awareness. Instead of concentrating primarily upon the deeply relaxed body, attention is deliberately expanded outward. One way of understanding it is wide-angle consciousness: thoughts, imagery, spatial awareness, sensations and sounds are noticed simultaneously without concentrating exclusively upon any single source. Gateway uses Focus 12 as the working state for many later exercises involving problem solving and anomalous perception.

The participant enters Focus 12 and presents one precise question or problem. Instead of consciously wrestling with the answer, he stops forcing the solution and observes whatever thoughts, images, words, memories or associations spontaneously emerge. Those impressions are evaluated afterward. Whether interpreted as access to expanded consciousness or simply unconscious information processing, this technique deliberately gives associative cognition room to operate without constant analytical interference.

Gateway's patterning technique asks the participant to construct a vivid representation of a desired future condition and experience it mentally as though it already exists. The useful interpretation is mental rehearsal: don't merely visualize the final reward. Visualize yourself performing the behaviors necessary to produce it. Gateway goes further by suggesting consciousness can influence circumstances. That manifestation claim remains unestablished, but detailed mental rehearsal and goal-directed behavior have much firmer foundations.

The participant combines breathing with visualization of particular colors associated with desired physical or emotional states. Gateway gives the colors specific energetic meanings. A grounded version uses the process as conditioning: repeatedly associate a particular color and breathing pattern with genuine relaxation. Eventually that combination may itself help retrieve the practiced state. Claims that imagined colors can directly cure disease should be treated separately from the relaxation technique.

Gateway participants construct an imaginary Energy Bar Tool, or EBT, that can be manipulated in shape, size, brightness and apparent intensity. Gateway describes it as a way of directing energy. Regardless of that interpretation, creating and maintaining an imaginary object with extremely precise texture, dimensions, temperature and brightness is demanding visualization training. It can also become a mental anchor: summon the EBT and associate its appearance with complete concentration.

The Living Body Map involves constructing a detailed mental representation of your physical body and systematically examining it. Attention moves through different areas while observing tension, pressure, temperature, pain and other sensations. Gateway extends the technique into energetic balancing. It should not replace medical diagnosis or treatment. Used simply as a highly detailed body scan, however, it trains awareness of physical information that normal consciousness often filters out.

The participant enters an expanded state, poses an important question and then attempts not to manufacture the answer consciously. Instead, he observes the first spontaneous word, image, sensation, memory or emotion that appears. Monroe interprets this in terms of communication with a larger or "total" self. A useful experiment is to record the response immediately and analyze it only afterward, preventing later reasoning from rewriting the original impression.

Gateway teaches participants to imagine receiving and distributing nonphysical energy throughout the body. Claims that an unknown external energy is literally being absorbed remain speculative. But the experiment can be performed without accepting that explanation: rate your energy level, perform the visualization, and rate it afterward. This tests whether visualization can alter subjective alertness. It should never replace actual nutrition, hydration, sleep or medical care.

Gateway explores thinking and communicating without ordinary internal speech. Try constructing the concept of "home," for example, without internally saying the word. Instead experience its images, emotions, spatial qualities, memories, smells and associations simultaneously. The exercise reveals how much normal thought gets compressed into language. Gateway extends this toward possible nonverbal information transfer between minds, a much more extraordinary proposition that requires controlled testing.

Gateway later explicitly trains intuition. A good experimental version is to record your immediate impression about an unknown outcome before analytical thought begins. Then separately make your reasoned prediction. Repeat this many times and compare both with actual results. This prevents selective memory from remembering spectacular intuitive successes while forgetting failures. If intuition contains information beyond ordinary reasoning, a sufficiently large written record should reveal it.

Lift Off begins Gateway's exploration of apparent separation from the physical body. While remaining motionless and deeply relaxed, the participant imagines awareness rising independently of the body. Some people experience extremely convincing sensations of floating or movement during altered states. The subjective experience can be genuine without establishing that consciousness literally left the body. Verifiable information obtained from a location inaccessible to normal perception would constitute a much stronger test.

Gateway expands the previous technique through imagined rolling, floating or otherwise separating one's perceived center of awareness from the physical body. Participants may experience dramatic changes in bodily boundaries and spatial orientation. The important experimental rule is to record the experience before interpreting it. "I felt myself leave my body" describes an experience. "My consciousness objectively left my body" is a hypothesis requiring additional evidence.

Gateway introduces directional control once unusual spatial sensations occur. The participant remains physically still while experiencing movement upward, downward, forward, backward or rotationally. When normal sensory references are reduced, imagined motion can become surprisingly convincing. Gateway uses these vectors as a navigation system for further exploration rather than allowing altered-state imagery to unfold randomly.

Focus 15 attempts to remove ordinary temporal reference. The participant stops attending to schedules, clocks, past and future while remaining conscious. Altered time perception is familiar from dreaming, meditation and intense flow states. That doesn't establish that a person literally exits physical time. Gateway nevertheless deliberately explores what consciousness feels like when normal temporal organization is substantially reduced.

Focus 21 represents Gateway's transition into its strongest metaphysical territory. Participants attempt to move beyond normal identification with physical reality and explore perceived nonphysical environments or intelligences. If a seemingly autonomous entity or environment appears, the disciplined approach is to document exactly what occurred before deciding what it was. The experience itself and the explanation for that experience are two separate questions.

Coordinate Remote Viewing became a highly structured system rather than simply "trying to see something far away." CENTER LANE documentation describes CRV training broken into multiple stages, progressing from general site characteristics through specific features and eventually three-dimensional modeling. Government documentation says training could last 12–18 months. The method's central principle was to obtain primitive information before analytical thinking turned it into a story.

ERV approached the problem differently. Instead of the highly structured CRV procedure, the viewer entered a deeply relaxed condition and maintained attention on internally arising perceptions. The similarity to Gateway is obvious: reduce physical distraction, maintain awareness and observe information that appears. ERV therefore represents an interesting bridge between Monroe-style altered states and intelligence-oriented remote viewing.

Researchers went further and investigated whether subjects could describe a target before the target itself was randomly selected. This removes ordinary information transfer in an especially dramatic way because the target doesn't yet exist as a selected target when the description is made. Properly testing this requires recording and locking the prediction before random selection and retaining every failure as carefully as every apparent success.

Government records demonstrate that future targeting wasn't merely theoretical. A GRILL FLAME session connected with the Iran hostage crisis instructed a remote viewer to move forward in time to March 22, 1980 while attempting to locate and describe a hostage. This proves that the experiment was attempted, not that the resulting future information was accurate. That distinction is crucial.

Remote viewing normally begins with a target already selected by somebody else. Search and tracking asks the viewer to determine where an unknown person, object or location actually is. This would obviously have enormous intelligence value if reliable. Government-sponsored research therefore investigated variations of the problem. Results described in the historical material were inconsistent enough that this should be viewed as experimental rather than dependable location technology.

The military didn't restrict remote viewing to laboratory targets. GRILL FLAME reports document sessions concerning real intelligence problems, including the American hostages in Iran. Significantly, the reports themselves sometimes labeled the viewers' impressions "raw intelligence" and warned that the material had not undergone normal evaluation. This shows that the organizations involved did not automatically regard a viewer's statement as established fact.

One method supplied the viewer with latitude and longitude rather than a description of the target. The purpose was to reduce ordinary clues. The viewer attempted to describe what existed at those coordinates. Modern experimental design can improve the procedure further by replacing recognizable coordinates with randomly generated target numbers so neither viewer nor immediate experimenter can infer the location.

One particularly intriguing Army report describes a training session in which the intended target was Offutt Air Force Base but erroneous coordinates were accidentally supplied. The report states that the viewer described geographical characteristics corresponding to the incorrect coordinates near Pisgah, Iowa—including a narrow meandering body of water and cliffs—rather than describing the intended airbase. It is an interesting case report rather than proof, but the accidental nature of the mistake makes it noteworthy.

Remote viewers learned to distinguish raw impressions from what they called Analytical Overlay. Suppose the initial information is "cold, metallic, vertical, hard." The analytical mind immediately announces "skyscraper." Once that happens, subsequent impressions may simply elaborate the invented skyscraper. CRV therefore teaches the viewer to record primitive sensations separately from interpretations. This principle has usefulness well beyond paranormal research: observation and explanation should not be confused.

Early CRV training uses rapid spontaneous marks called ideograms. Immediately after receiving targeting information, the viewer allows the hand to produce a quick mark and then examines the associated sensory or conceptual impression. The theory is that a very brief response may emerge before analytical thought contaminates it. Whether that response contains paranormal information is disputed, but it provides an interesting method for studying extremely rapid pre-analytical cognition.

Rather than announcing "I'm seeing a lighthouse," the viewer records primitive information: bright, vertical, hard, cold, windy, rhythmic sound, water. Only later are those components assembled and compared with the target. This prevents imagination from constructing an elaborate scene prematurely. The procedure resembles disciplined observation in other fields: collect data first and build the hypothesis afterward.

Government-held research reviews discuss experiments at Maimonides Hospital in which sleeping participants' dreams were compared with pictorial targets being viewed by remote "senders." Researchers including Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner and Charles Honorton investigated the idea over multiple experimental series. The hypothesis was that dreaming might reduce normal sensory competition sufficiently for weak anomalous information to become detectable. The historical experiments remain controversial, but the protocol is fascinating because dreams were recorded before target comparison.

Ganzfeld experiments attempt to create a homogeneous sensory environment. Participants traditionally recline with a uniform visual field and white noise while describing spontaneous imagery associated with a concealed target. Government-archived reviews discuss this technique and its use in alleged telepathic experiments. The underlying hypothesis resembles Gateway: normal sensory information may create so much "noise" that extremely weak information is obscured. Reducing that noise supposedly makes the signal easier to detect.

This one was actually investigated under government-sponsored research. SRI was tasked in 1986 to examine whether hypnosis could improve remote-viewing performance, and a later report summarized three studies involving four remote viewers over several years. The rationale was that hypnosis might create a state more conducive to anomalous perception. Whether it actually improves remote viewing remained an experimental question, but this demonstrates how seriously researchers investigated altered consciousness as a performance variable.

Psychokinesis, or PK, proposes that intention can affect physical systems without conventional physical interaction. Government archives contain extensive discussion of such claims. Investigators recognized immediately that spectacular demonstrations such as bending metal were extremely vulnerable to trickery. More serious research therefore moved toward systems that produced numerical results, where alleged effects could be tested statistically rather than judged visually.

One of the cleanest PK experiments used electronic random-number generators. Participants attempted to mentally bias an otherwise random stream toward one outcome. Archived experiments used systems based on processes such as radioactive decay. This approach is superior to spoon bending because predictions can be specified beforehand and millions of outcomes can be analyzed statistically. Government documents also acknowledged possible ordinary explanations such as subtle electronic interference, illustrating why rigorous controls matter.

Army material explicitly describes "remote perturbation" experiments: attempts to mentally influence a distant physical system. One declassified project description notes that many dramatic telekinesis stories collapse under controlled observation, but argues that random-event experiments deserved investigation because their results could be expressed probabilistically. The document simultaneously raises an important alternative explanation—normal electronic interference—which demonstrates the necessity of shielding and controls.

Cold War intelligence analysts collected extensive material concerning Soviet and Eastern Bloc research into what was variously called telepathy, bioinformation, psychotronics and psychoenergetics. Reports discussed alleged mind-to-mind information transfer, distant influence, altered states and other unconventional phenomena. The existence of those intelligence reports demonstrates U.S. interest in foreign claims, not that every Soviet experiment was genuine. Cold War misinformation and weak methodology are obvious competing explanations that must remain on the table.

Government archives contain reports concerning Kirlian photography, alleged human energy fields, acupuncture-related electrical measurements, telekinesis experiments and devices intended to detect unusual fields. One CIA-held technical memorandum describing a fact-finding trip to Russia discusses Kirlian photography, acupuncture-point devices, telekinesis experiments and field detectors. Some early enthusiasts interpreted unusual photographic corona effects as evidence of a biological "aura." Conventional high-voltage electrical effects provide explanations for much of Kirlian imagery, so the photographs themselves do not establish a metaphysical energy body. Nevertheless, the episode illustrates just how broadly Cold War researchers searched for measurable physical correlates of alleged psychic phenomena.

One of the strangest STAR GATE documents records a 1984 session targeting Mars approximately one million years B.C. The viewer was directed through Martian coordinates and reported enormous structures, pyramid-like forms, violent environmental conditions and extremely tall, thin beings apparently facing catastrophe. Nothing in the document proves that ancient Martians existed. What makes the document extraordinary is that this wasn't subsequently invented internet folklore: a government-associated remote-viewing session actually targeted ancient Mars and preserved the resulting transcript.

Ingo Swann participated in experiments involving attempts to perceive Jupiter remotely, extending the remote-viewing hypothesis far beyond terrestrial locations. The underlying question was radical but logically consistent: if anomalous perception wasn't carried through conventional sensory mechanisms, why should geographical distance—or even interplanetary distance—matter? Claims that some of Swann's descriptions anticipated later astronomical observations remain controversial and are vulnerable to retrospective matching. Nevertheless, extraterrestrial remote viewing was genuinely discussed in material preserved in the government archive.

Researchers considered remote viewing and anomalous communication under conditions involving a submerged submarine. This was scientifically interesting because seawater severely attenuates many forms of electromagnetic radiation. If anomalous perception continued under substantial shielding, conventional electromagnetic explanations would become less attractive. Reports of success don't establish a new communications channel, but the experiment represents a clever attempt to determine whether physical shielding affected whatever researchers thought they were observing.

Some researchers went beyond psychology and considered whether apparent remote viewing and precognition would require a radically different model of information. Government-held SRI material discusses speculative physical models involving expanded representations of space-time. The idea was essentially this: if information genuinely appeared to cross both spatial and temporal boundaries, perhaps ordinary four-dimensional descriptions were incomplete. This was theoretical speculation, not a discovered law of physics, but it demonstrates just how seriously some researchers explored possible mechanisms.

Cold War intelligence reports discuss Soviet research claims involving telepathy, hypnosis at a distance, "biocommunication," psychotronics and possible behavioral influence. One government-held research review specifically describes Soviet experiments aimed at long-distance communication and alleged behavioral modification, including attempts to awaken subjects from hypnotic sleep through distant mental suggestion. These reports document claims and research interests—not a proven Soviet mind-control weapon. But the possibility that one human consciousness could remotely influence another was seriously enough regarded to attract intelligence attention. (Source: CIA Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000300030003-0)

This deserves separation from general psychotronics because of how specific the alleged effect was. U.S. government-held material reviewing Soviet work describes experiments attributed to researchers such as L. Vasiliev and I. M. Kogan involving attempts to produce or interrupt sleep through distant mental suggestion. Some reportedly involved substantial geographical separation. If genuine, such an effect would be extraordinary. The surviving material establishes that these experiments were reported and taken seriously enough to be analyzed; it does not independently establish that telepathic hypnosis worked. (Source: CIA Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000300030003-0)

Cold War parapsychology wasn't restricted to people describing pictures. Researchers investigated whether living systems might respond to extremely weak environmental or purported biological influences. Government-held material discusses Soviet interest in electromagnetic effects on living organisms, extremely low-level fields and alleged "bioinformation." Some reports even describe experiments involving conditioning effects in animals exposed to weak fields. The legitimate biological effects of electromagnetic fields must be distinguished from paranormal claims, but researchers were explicitly looking for connections between living organisms, unusual information transfer and subtle physical fields. (Source: CIA Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000300030003-0)

The intelligence archive also contains foreign parapsychological literature concerning survival after bodily death. One CIA-held survey of parapsychology specifically references experimental and spontaneous evidence being investigated under the heading of survival after death. That doesn't mean CIA established an afterlife; this particular material is largely intelligence collection concerning research conducted elsewhere. Nevertheless, the question of whether some component of consciousness could continue independently of the physical body existed within the broader body of material collected and evaluated by intelligence agencies. (Source: CIA Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000700890001-3)

Some of the most disturbing Cold War material discusses proposed technologies or psychic mechanisms for remotely detecting or influencing another person's physiological or mental condition. A document preserved in the CIA archive discusses Pentagon interest in Soviet ESP research and references concepts involving remote monitors and stimulators intended to determine or influence another person. This is exactly where caution is necessary: the archive contains proposals, press material, intelligence assessments and genuine experimental reports side by side. Presence in the archive therefore establishes historical interest, not operational capability. (Source: CIA Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001700360003-3)

This is the question connecting nearly everything in our 50-entry collection.

Gateway asks whether awareness can function when ordinary bodily sensation becomes extremely quiet.

Remote viewing asks whether information can apparently arrive without normal sensory contact.

Precognition asks whether information can apparently arrive before the event occurs.

OBE research asks whether someone's perceived center of awareness can become independent of his perceived physical location.

Psychokinesis asks whether consciousness can affect physical systems without conventional physical interaction.

Telepathy asks whether information can pass directly between minds.

The most radical interpretation is that consciousness might not be entirely confined to the brain, body, location and present moment in the way ordinary experience suggests.

That remains an extraordinary and scientifically unresolved proposition.

And this is precisely where the government's eventual STAR GATE evaluation becomes important. One independent reviewer of the program wrote that researchers believed they had demonstrated "anomalous cognition," but he considered that conclusion premature and emphasized that a revolutionary claim requires independent replication. (Source: CIA Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00789R003200290001-5.pdf)

That skepticism belongs in our collection just as much as the extraordinary results do. The archive itself contains sessions judged impressive and sessions judged failures. One GRILL FLAME report, for example, states that a viewer's imagery showed "absolutely no target correlation." (Source: CIA Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r000900390001-1)

So #50 leaves us with the genuinely fascinating question rather than pretending we already possess the answer:

Is consciousness entirely generated locally by the brain, or can some aspect of information or awareness operate beyond the conventional sensory boundaries of the individual?

The declassified programs investigated pieces of that question.

They did not settle it.