Remote Viewing for Beginners: The Protocol, the Evidence, and How to Practice

Remote viewing is a structured protocol for describing a target you have no ordinary way of knowing about, identified to you only by a random reference number. It is not a general word for psychic ability. The term comes from a specific research lineage that began at Stanford Research Institute in 1972, ran through the U.S. government’s Stargate Project, and ended when the CIA closed the program in 1995.

That history should shape how you learn it. Search for how to remote view and you will find two incompatible versions of the subject. One presents remote viewing as a dormant power waiting to be unlocked. The other dismisses it in a sentence. The mainstream scientific position sits much closer to the second: there is no accepted evidence that remote viewing works, and it is generally classed as pseudoscience. The declassified record behind that verdict, though, is stranger and more detailed than either camp admits, and the training method it left behind is worth understanding on its own terms.

This guide to remote viewing for beginners covers what the practice actually is, where controlled remote viewing came from, what twenty-three years of government-funded research concluded, how it differs from the CIA Gateway Process that keeps circulating on TikTok, and how to run and score your first sessions without fooling yourself.

Written by Claudio Pires, editor at Growwwth. Sources: the CIA’s declassified STARGATE archive, the SRI training documents filed in it, and the 1995 American Institutes for Research evaluation. Last reviewed October 2026. Growwwth has no commercial relationship with any course, app, teacher or website mentioned in this guide.

Remote viewing at a glance

• What it is: describing a hidden target, known to you only by a reference number, under blind conditions, then checking your description against the real target.
• Where it came from: CIA-funded research at Stanford Research Institute from 1972, later formalized as Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) with the artist Ingo Swann.
• Government use: about 23 years and roughly $20 million across Army, DIA and CIA programs, the last of them called Stargate.
• The verdict: a 1995 review for the CIA found the output too vague for intelligence use, and the program was closed. Its two expert reviewers disagreed on whether the lab statistics showed a real effect.
• Scientific status: no accepted scientific evidence that remote viewing works.
• How to practice fairly: a target chosen by someone else, a blind protocol, and decoy judging, where chance alone scores 25 percent.

What Remote Viewing Actually Is

In a proper session, four conditions hold at once:

• The viewer is blind to the target. You are given a reference number such as 4471-8829 and nothing else. No topic, no category, no hints.
• The person running the session is also blind. This is double-blind. Without it, the monitor leaks cues through tone and phrasing without meaning to.
• The target is selected after or independently of the viewer’s session, from a pool prepared in advance.
• Feedback is given afterward. You find out what the target was and compare it against what you recorded.

Strip any one of those and you no longer have remote viewing. You have guessing with extra steps. The protocol is the definition, which is why the original researchers spent more effort on session design than on the viewers themselves.

A session produces raw descriptors rather than pictures. Viewers typically report texture, temperature, dimension, color, motion, ambient sound, and emotional tone before anything resembling an image appears. Most sessions never produce a clear image at all, and the ones that do are often wrong in ways that are instructive.

Where the Method Came From: Ingo Swann and Coordinate Remote Viewing

The structured method most beginners learn today grew out of SRI’s work in the 1970s and early 1980s, much of it built around Ingo Swann, a New York artist who worked with physicist Harold Puthoff first as a test subject and later as a consultant. In the early experiments, the only cue a viewer received was a pair of geographic coordinates, latitude and longitude. That is where the name Coordinate Remote Viewing comes from. The later military training version is usually called Controlled Remote Viewing, and both go by CRV.

The reference numbers used in modern practice descend directly from those coordinates. Both do the same job: they point at a target without describing it.

The SRI training reports, now part of the CIA archive, state the problem Swann and Puthoff were trying to solve. When people tried to picture a distant site, they mostly produced memory and imagination. Their answer was to break a session into stages that move from raw, almost physical reactions toward detail, and to keep the viewer from naming things too early.

Stage	What the viewer records	Example
I	An ideogram, a fast reflexive mark on the paper, then a first gestalt such as land, water or structure	A wavy stroke that suggests water
II	Sensory contact: textures, temperatures, colors, sounds, smells	Cold, wind, salt in the air
III	Dimension, motion and mobility, usually as rough sketches	Tall, narrow, open above
IV	Qualitative detail, including emotional and aesthetic impressions	Quiet, solemn, ceremonial
V	Optional follow-up questioning of earlier data	Probing one descriptor in depth
VI	A three-dimensional model of the site	A rough model in clay or paper

For a beginner, only Stages I to III matter. The later stages assume months of supervised practice. The six-step session later in this guide is a stripped-down version of those first three, built around the one habit CRV tries hardest to teach: record what you perceive before you decide what it is. Most remote viewing techniques taught online today are variations on those same three stages, whatever name they are sold under.

What the Declassified Record Actually Shows

Physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ began testing subjects at Stanford Research Institute in 1972 under contract to the CIA. Interest spread to the Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency, producing a chain of programs with rotating code names including Grill Flame, Center Lane, and Sun Streak, eventually consolidated under the name Stargate and run out of Fort Meade, Maryland. Over roughly twenty-three years the effort cost about $20 million.

The Stargate Project timeline below draws on the Federation of American Scientists’ program history and the CIA archive.

Year	What happened
1972	Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff begin CIA-funded remote viewing experiments at Stanford Research Institute.
1974	Pat Price’s Semipalatinsk session, still the program’s most-cited early hit.
1977	Army intelligence starts Gondola Wish to assess how adversaries might use remote viewing.
1978	The Army forms an operational remote viewing unit, Grill Flame, at Fort Meade, Maryland.
1983	The unit is renamed Center Lane, and Swann and Puthoff’s staged CRV training method is in use.
1985	Army funding ends, and the unit moves to the Defense Intelligence Agency as Sun Streak.
1991	Research moves from SRI to SAIC, and the program is renamed Stargate.
1995	The AIR evaluation is completed on September 29, the program ends, and the report is made public on November 28.

Supporters of the program usually point to a handful of striking sessions. The best known dates from 1974, when viewer Pat Price, given only map coordinates, described a large gantry crane at what turned out to be a Soviet nuclear testing area at Semipalatinsk. The Federation of American Scientists’ history of the STAR GATE program adds the part that rarely gets quoted: most of the rest of that description was wrong or could not be checked. A memorable hit surrounded by misses is exactly the kind of result a scoring protocol exists to test, which is why anecdotes like this cannot settle the question on their own.

In 1995, Congress directed the CIA to evaluate whether the program should continue. The CIA commissioned the American Institutes for Research, which assembled a panel deliberately split between a sympathetic and a skeptical expert: statistician Jessica Utts of UC Davis and psychologist Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon.

The panel focused its statistical review on the program’s final phase. In 1991 the research contract moved from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) under Edwin May, who by the FAS account oversaw about 70 percent of the contractor budget and 85 percent of the data collection across the program’s life. The review centered on ten SAIC experiments run between 1991 and 1994.

Utts and Hyman reached different conclusions, and the disagreement is the substance of the record.

Utts concluded that the accumulated data showed a statistically significant effect that could not be explained by chance, with some subjects scoring measurably above baseline across large trial counts. Hyman agreed the statistical pattern was not trivially dismissible, but argued that Utts’s conclusion was premature. His objections were specific: the same judge had scored every SAIC experiment, the remote viewing results had never been reproduced by an independent laboratory, and weaknesses in how sessions were judged could account for much of the effect.

Where they agreed was the operational question. The AIR report, titled “An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications” and dated September 29, 1995, concluded in its executive summary that the information remote viewing produced was too vague and ambiguous to yield intelligence of sufficient quality and accuracy for action, and that continued use in intelligence gathering was not warranted. AIR also interviewed the intelligence users who had tasked the viewers, and in none of the cases it examined had those users actually acted on remote viewing information. The CIA ended the program that year, and the AIR report was made public in November 1995. Most of the program’s files were declassified and released over the years that followed.

The full archive is public. The CIA’s STARGATE collection in its Electronic Reading Room holds thousands of indexed documents, including training manuals, session transcripts, and the review correspondence. It is worth browsing directly rather than reading someone’s summary of it, including this one.

Two things follow from that record, and honest beginner guides should say both. No declassified document shows a remote viewing session that produced decisive intelligence on its own. And the statistical argument Utts raised was never resolved to both sides’ satisfaction; the program was simply defunded. Since then, mainstream science has treated remote viewing as unproven, and the burden of proof sits with anyone who claims it works.

Why the Protocol Has the Steps It Has

Every stage in a remote viewing protocol exists to suppress a specific failure mode.

Cooldown exists because a busy mind supplies its own content. Five to ten minutes of stillness lowers the volume of internal chatter enough that you can tell the difference between a thought you generated and an impression that arrived.

The reference number exists because knowing anything about the target contaminates the session. In the literature, advance information is called frontloading. Sometimes it is given deliberately in operational work. In training it is poison, because you can no longer tell whether you perceived something or inferred it.

Sketching before naming exists because language collapses ambiguity too early. The moment you write “bridge,” you stop recording the curve, the span, and the tension you were actually perceiving, and start filling in a generic bridge from memory.

Feedback and judging at the end exist because without them you never calibrate. You cannot improve at something you cannot score.

As with any structured process, the discipline is in following it exactly before you start improvising. Most beginners invert this and improvise from session one.

Analytical Overlay: The Mistake That Ruins Most Beginner Sessions

Analytic overlay, usually written as AOL, is the single concept that separates people who improve from people who plateau.

AOL is what happens when your analytical mind receives a fragment of raw data and immediately supplies a complete object. You perceive “hard, flat, reflective, vertical” and your mind says window. The label feels like a perception. It is not. It is a conclusion, and once you write it down you stop collecting the actual signal.

In the Controlled Remote Viewing method Swann developed at SRI, the handling is not to suppress it. Suppressing it makes it louder. Instead:

1. Write the AOL down explicitly, labeled as AOL. “AOL: window.”
2. Put your pen down and pause for a breath.
3. Return to raw descriptors only.

This does two things. It discharges the impulse so it stops competing for attention, and it leaves an audit trail. When you review sessions later, you will find that your AOLs are frequently wrong while the descriptors underneath them were frequently right. That pattern is the most useful thing a beginner can discover about their own perception, and you cannot discover it unless you record both separately.

A session log full of confident nouns is a bad session log. A session log full of hedged sensory fragments with AOLs flagged in the margin is a good one, even when the target turns out to be nothing like what you expected.

Remote Viewing vs Clairvoyance vs Astral Projection

Aspect	Clairvoyance	Remote Viewing	Astral Projection
Structure	None required	Blind protocol, fixed stages	None required
Target	Open or self-chosen	Assigned, concealed, pre-selected	Self-directed
Verification	Usually none	Built in through feedback and judging	Not verifiable
Sense of location	Viewer stays present	Viewer stays present	Viewer experiences leaving the body
Research history	Informal	About 23 years of documented government study	Anecdotal

The practical difference is verification. Remote viewing was designed by people who needed to score it. That constraint is what separates it from everything adjacent to it.

Remote Viewing vs the CIA Gateway Process

If you found this topic through TikTok or YouTube, there is a good chance it reached you through the CIA Gateway Process document rather than remote viewing itself. The two are often presented as the same thing. They are not.

The Gateway document is a 1983 U.S. Army assessment titled “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process,” written by Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell. It evaluates the Gateway Experience, a guided audio program from the Monroe Institute in Virginia that uses a sound technique called Hemi-Sync to induce deep relaxation and altered states, including the out-of-body experiences the institute’s founder, Robert Monroe, wrote about. The report sits in the same declassified STARGATE collection as the remote viewing files and was approved for public release in 2003. The public copy is famously missing page 25; in 2021, Vice reported obtaining the page from the Monroe Institute.

Three differences matter if you are deciding which one to try:

• Gateway is an analysis, not an experiment. The report is a theoretical attempt to explain the technique in terms of physics and brain science. It contains no controlled trials and no scored results.
• Gateway aims inward. Its goal is an experience: relaxation, altered states, a sense of leaving the body. Remote viewing aims at a checkable description of something outside you.
• Gateway has no feedback step. Nothing in the process tells you whether what you experienced corresponds to anything real, which is the one thing a remote viewing protocol is built to do.

You can practice both, and plenty of people do. Just do not treat a vivid Gateway session as evidence of remote viewing ability. Only a blind, scored session can tell you that.

Your First Session: A Six-Step Beginner Protocol

You need paper, a pen, a timer, and a partner or a target app. Twenty minutes total.

1. Prepare the target pool without looking. Have a partner seal five images in envelopes and label them with random four-digit numbers. If you are working alone, use a target app that keeps images hidden until you request feedback, or ask a friend to fill a folder with numbered images you have never seen and pick one with a random number generator. Never choose your own target.
2. Cool down for five minutes. Sit, breathe, do nothing. Do not visualize. Do not set an intention about the target. The goal is a quiet baseline, not a mystical state.
3. Write the reference number at the top of the page. Say it once, silently. That is the entire cue. If your hand makes a quick reflexive mark as you write it, keep it. That is the CRV ideogram, and the first thing to record is how it feels: rising, flat, wavy, hard.
4. Record for ten minutes, descriptors only. Texture, temperature, dimension, color, shape, motion, sound, smell, emotional tone. Short fragments. No sentences, no nouns. Sketch anything that wants to be sketched. Flag every AOL and return to descriptors.
5. Stop on the timer. Do not extend a session because it feels productive. Sessions that feel good are not more accurate, and the belief that they are is how people train themselves into overconfidence.
6. Get feedback and judge it. Open the envelope. Then do the part almost everyone skips, described below.

How to Score a Session Honestly

Self-scoring by impression is worthless. Everyone looks at a target, looks at their notes, and finds correspondences. That effect is well documented in psychology as subjective validation, and it is the reason casual practice produces confident viewers who are not actually improving.

Use decoy judging instead. Have your partner show you the real target plus three decoys from the same pool, in random order, without telling you which is which. Rank all four against your session notes. Then reveal.

Chance is 25 percent. Track your rate across several dozen sessions before drawing any conclusion from it. That single number will tell you more than any number of sessions that merely felt accurate.

Keep a log with the date, reference number, full descriptor list, AOLs flagged, your ranking, and the actual target. Review it monthly and look for which descriptor categories track with the target for you and which do not. The point is not to reach a conclusion someone else handed you. It is to find out what your own reliable and unreliable categories are, which nobody can tell you in advance.

How Many Hits It Takes to Beat Chance

Several dozen sessions is not an arbitrary number. The table below shows how many first-place rankings you would need, out of a fixed number of judged sessions, before luck becomes an unlikely explanation. The cutoff is the usual 5 percent threshold, from a one-sided binomial test with a 25 percent chance of a hit on every session.

Judged sessions	Hits expected by chance	First-place hits needed	Hit rate needed
10	2.5	6	60%
20	5	9	45%
30	7.5	13	43%
50	12.5	19	38%
100	25	33	33%

Two things stand out. Short runs demand hit rates almost nobody sustains: six out of ten sounds impressive and only just clears the bar. And the thresholds hold only if you fix the number of sessions in advance. If you check your rate after every session and stop the moment it looks good, luck alone will eventually hand you a streak that looks significant. Pick a block of sessions, run all of them, then look.

A Sample Session Log, Annotated

Here is an illustrative beginner page. It is written to show the format, not taken from a specific logged session. Target 3318-0472, ten minutes:

Cold. Wet. Vertical drop. Loud, continuous, not rhythmic. White, moving fast downward. Wide at the top, narrowing. AOL: waterfall. Return to descriptors. Green at the edges, dark underneath. Air moving. Open above, enclosed below.

The target in this example is an industrial cooling tower. Judged against three decoys, the page ranks the correct target second, not first, which counts as a miss.

Notice what happened. Most of the raw descriptors were reasonable. The AOL was wrong and the wrongness was informative, because the mind grabbed the nearest familiar object that fit cold, wet, vertical, and loud. A log like this is worth more than a lucky hit, because you can see exactly where the session turned from observation into conclusion.

Where to Get Practice Targets

Quality practice depends entirely on target quality. Good remote viewing practice targets need to be visually distinct from each other, unambiguous, and pre-selected by someone who is not you.

Members of the r/RemoteViewing community regularly post practice targets and give feedback on each other’s sessions, which is the closest thing to a free, structured training environment. Treat it like any open forum: the targets are useful, and the claims in the comments need the same scoring discipline as your own.

Avoid target sets built around dramatic subjects. Beginners score well on them for the wrong reason, because dramatic targets share obvious features and inflate hit rates.

Associative Remote Viewing: Can It Predict Markets or the Lottery?

Associative remote viewing, usually shortened to ARV, is the variant most often sold with a profit angle. Instead of describing a hidden photo for its own sake, you tie each possible outcome of a future event to an unrelated image. A market closing up might be a lighthouse; closing down, a bowl of fruit. Before the outcome is known, the viewer describes the image they will be shown later as feedback. A judge matches that description to one of the images, and the prediction is whichever outcome the image stands for. After the event, the viewer sees only the image tied to what actually happened.

Two results get quoted more than any others. In 1982, Russell Targ and Keith Harary reported nine correct calls in a row on silver futures. And a study by Christopher Carson Smith, Darrell Laham and Garret Moddel at the University of Colorado, published in 2014, reported untrained viewers predicting the direction of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in seven out of seven trials.

Look at the sample sizes before the headlines. Seven correct calls on an up-or-down outcome happen by luck about once in every 128 attempts, and a run that goes three for seven rarely gets written up. Targ’s own team could not repeat the silver run the following year. Prediction claims outside ARV fare no better under testing: when researchers Rose and Blackmore tested a self-described psychic’s horse-racing predictions in 2002, he scored 21 hits in 210 trials, exactly what chance predicted for that design.

If someone sells ARV as a trading or lottery edge, apply the same filter you would to any system that claims to predict markets: ask for a long, live, independently verifiable record rather than a highlight reel. Our framework for how to evaluate an AI trading bot before you fund it transfers almost line for line, because the underlying question is identical. Does the method beat chance across enough trials to matter, after costs, in the hands of someone other than the seller?

How to Evaluate a Course or Teacher

There is a paid training industry around this topic, and quality varies enormously. Before you spend money, check four things.

Does the instructor name their lineage and training specifically, including who trained them and when? Do they publish scored session data rather than testimonials? Do they use blind protocols in instruction, or do they discuss targets in advance? And do they describe the 1995 AIR findings accurately, including Hyman’s objections, or do they present Stargate as unambiguous proof?

That last one is the fastest filter. Anyone who summarizes the declassified record as a clean vindication is either uninformed or selling you something. The same experience, expertise and trust signals you would apply to any online claim apply here, and they matter more in an unregulated field.

Notice that audience size is not on the list. A teacher with a large YouTube or TikTok following has proven they can hold attention, which is a different skill from proving their sessions beat chance. Ask for the scored data either way.

What Practice Actually Gives You

Set the metaphysical question aside for a moment. Mainstream science considers remote viewing unproven, a minority of researchers think the old lab data still deserve a better explanation, and you are not going to settle it at your kitchen table.

What a disciplined remote viewing practice reliably trains is narrower and more defensible. You learn to hold attention on faint signal without grabbing at it. You learn to notice the exact moment your mind substitutes a conclusion for an observation. You learn to record uncertainty accurately instead of rounding it to confidence. And you learn what your own accuracy rate actually is, which almost nobody knows about any of their judgments.

Those are transferable. Acting well on incomplete information is a skill, which is part of why deliberate, calculated risk-taking shows up so consistently in serious personal development work. Whatever remote viewing turns out to be, the protocol is unusually good at teaching it.

Further Resources

For the history and the primary documents, the CIA’s STARGATE archive is the place to start, and the FAS program history linked above is the clearest short summary of it. For the contemporary practice community, r/RemoteViewing posts open practice targets with feedback.

If what drew you to this subject is the spiritual question rather than the protocol, that is a different tradition with its own teachers. https://shams-tabriz.com is the site of Shams-Tabriz, a Bali-based spiritual mentor and author who works with astrology, numerology and personal readings. It approaches intuition as a spiritual path rather than something to score, so read it on those terms rather than as a test of the protocol described here.

Does Remote Viewing Work, How Long It Takes, and Other Beginner Questions