1304: Remote Viewing | Skeptical Sunday

1304: Remote Viewing | Skeptical Sunday

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer and researcher Nick Pell. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of [00:01:00] everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Guys and girls, strap yourself in because this is going to be a weird one. Not that we ever give Nick Pell any Skeptical Sunday topic.

That's not weird. By the way, this one though, this is like something outta Stranger Things or The X Files, but the United States government has put tons of money into something called remote viewing. The idea here is wild through what's basically a kind of meditation you can supposedly see in your mind's eye something that's happening across the state, across the world, even across the galaxy? Project Stargate.

No, not the movie with Kurt Russell and James Spader, but a real government project sought to develop psychic super spies who could look into the most secure rooms of the Kremlin. And then, I don't know, draft reports or whatever. Now I know what you're thinking. This can't possibly be real, right? That would be a waste of taxpayer dollars, but here we are.

I'll admit it sounds like nonsense, but here's the thing. The government spent [00:02:00] millions of taxpayer dollars and more than two decades trying to figure out if this could actually work. That alone makes it worth looking at if only two understand how something this strange made it into serious military research.

Here today, to help me see things clearly is writer and researcher Nick Pell.

Nick Pell: James Bond with a crystal ball, people. That's what we're talking about today.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's basically what remote viewing is, but for those who aren't already aware. Yeah. Explain this, man. It's so bizarre.

Nick Pell: Honestly, James Bond with a crystal ball is really not the worst way of putting it.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: But the strictest definition of remote viewing is the ability to perceive distant and unseen targets using extra sensory perception, commonly known as ESP. So basically the idea is that you either have this innate psychic ability to do this, or you can be trained to do so through a sort of meditation.

Jordan Harbinger: Can you explain what [00:03:00] this is and where it comes from, because it's so hard to believe the United States government came up with this in the sixties based on something they saw on an episode of the Outer Limits or whatever. Come on.

Nick Pell: That's a deep cut and a good show beyond just occultist kooks trying to train themselves in the art of clairvoyance.

We have studies on this extending all the way back into the 19th century. These scientific tests examined people thought to be psychically gifted in extremely limited and controlled circumstances.

Jordan Harbinger: Did any of the tests say that people could remotely view things like, was it real at all?

Nick Pell: Yes, but the problem is they generally weren't accepted by the scientific community or respected at all.

It's a weird catch 22 because. They're doing these studies, but the scientific community only cares about what they find if they find that remote [00:04:00] viewing isn't real.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: They're not really in the best position, but there's more to it than that. There's a man named Joseph Banks Rhine, whose more Googleable name is J. B. Rhine.

He's the founder of Parapsychology.

Jordan Harbinger: What's parapsychology?

Nick Pell: Parapsychology is like psychic stuff.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so it's like.

Nick Pell: Bullshit.

Jordan Harbinger: It's a scientific field that studies something that is not real so far.

Nick Pell: Yeah. This isn't going to be the last Ghostbusters reference on this episode, but this ain't Ghostbusters.

There's not like a department at NYU studying. This is of course, like we're going to get the one professor. Parapsychology at NYU?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Okay. So as far as we know, the field is very small slash non-existent, basically.

Nick Pell: Yeah. He's a founder of this. He decides to do broader population tests, random people instead of just the amazing Chris.

Well, or some. Other Swami

Jordan Harbinger: tell me the amazing Criswell is a [00:05:00] real guy.

Nick Pell: The amazing Criswell is absolutely a real guy, and you should go watch the film. Ed Wood, he was a confident of America's finest director, Edward D. Wood Jr. But yeah, ed Wood's a great film about, a amazing American icon who's sadly was. A remote viewer, we could talk more about him.

So, JB Rhine tries really hard to look at this from a scientific perspective and make the tests as limited and falsifiable as he possibly can. He gets some results that support the notion of extrasensory perception or ESP, of which remote viewing is one kind, but he really doesn't want to release them to the broader scientific community.

Because he knows they're going to be seen as weird and inherently flawed because they find some evidence of ESP.

Jordan Harbinger: How good are his studies? Because as I'm aware and you're aware, you can make a study, say like anything [00:06:00] provided you design the study in the right way,

Nick Pell: which is clearly like, 'cause I know this is going to be a criticism, especially of me.

We're not saying that all studies are nonsense. We're saying that some studies are nonsense. And they say, you know what they're designed to say. None of Rhine's other studies have been reliably replicated. So for those of you playing at home, his studies are junk and it's not for lack of trying or people actively trying to sabotage his legacy.

People try to extremely hard to replicate his studies and they came up short. So Ghostbusters, you guys, everybody here over the age of 35 probably remembers the scene in Ghostbusters with the cards.

Jordan Harbinger: Right? Yes. Where Bill Murray is torturing the male grad student and flirting with the female one while they try and guess what images are on the other side of playing cards?

Yeah.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So that's based on one of Rhine's experiments Princeton University did. Over 25,000 [00:07:00] trials with 132 subjects, they found zero evidence of ESP. And I feel like remote viewing is already off to a bad start because if you can't see what's on the other side of a playing card three feet in front of you, I'm not really sure that you're going to be able to find the secret Nazi bases on the dark side of the moon.

Jordan Harbinger: Is Rhine a quack or just too credulous or what? You said he was a serious scientist, so why are his studies so bad?

Nick Pell: Here's the thing. He's a serious scientist, but he's kind of not a very good one. The general consensus is that he's not a fraud. He's just, he has a really bad methodology and possibly because he was just bad at science, possibly because he really wanted to.

He really wants ESP to be real, and it could also just be a combination of both, but. We know his methodology is flawed. We know that he really wants ESP to be real and his, we [00:08:00] know his studies are junk because no one's ever replicated them. His research took place at Duke, which eventually spun off the Rhyme Research Center, which is still active today.

Jordan Harbinger: It's funny to think of a serious institution like Duke doing kooky bad science like this. What is Rhine's lab up to these days?

Nick Pell: They're researching a lot of the stuff that we're talking about here, different forms of mind over matter energy healing. They claim very emphatically that all of these different ESP phenomenon are real.

They're focused less on proving that it's real, which that may provide some insight into what's wrong with their methodology. They consider this settled science. They just think it's all real, and now they just want to explain how it works. You could get online courses that will help you. To hone your psychic abilities.

They also act as a community hub for people who believe in ESP remote viewing, whatever you want to call it.

Jordan Harbinger: So how did the strange [00:09:00] dark corner of Cold War research begin anyway? Where did all this come from?

Nick Pell: It sounds like something out of the weirdness of the sixties, and it sort of is in the sense that.

Most of what people think of as the sixties actually took place in the seventies. The key government project here was the Stargate Project, which took place at Fort Mead in Maryland.

Jordan Harbinger: Is this what that movie, is it the men who Stare at Goats? Is that what that's based on? I.

Nick Pell: Sort of the movie is fictional, but most of the characters are composites or just loosely based on someone else.

It gives you a flavor of the kind of high weirdness that was going on at Fort Mead during that time, but it's not about Fort Mead in the same way that Born on the 4th of July is about wrong COVID. It's fictionalized.

Jordan Harbinger: Got it. So it's a sort of loose retelling of actual events without being beholden to anything specific.

Nick Pell: Yes. Stargate Project was actually the name of the consolidated project. Originally, it [00:10:00] was a whole bunch of different military intelligence programs with fanciful names like Gondola Wish Grill, flame Center Lane, sun Streak, scan Gate, and Stargate.

Jordan Harbinger: And then what? They eventually all got lumped together into an official government project.

When was that?

Nick Pell: Man, you are going to think this is nuts. 1991.

Jordan Harbinger: So, wow. So as recently as when I am 11 years old, the government is still trying to figure out how to train soldiers to see things on the other side of the planet with their mind.

Nick Pell: Yeah, they actually closed this project in 1995, so either during my freshman or sophomore year of high school.

Jordan Harbinger: What I love about this story so far is that it's not just a bunch of weird acid burnouts in a basement in 1969. It's multiple arms of the military and intelligence community. Over a period of decades. That ended when Dr. Dre was on the radio already. Geez, man, [00:11:00] what? Come on.

Clip: It's just another day for Dre.

Nick Pell: Let me ride, man. That's one. It was actually run out of a leaky wooden barracks apparently, but yes, you're correct. They did stuff other than remote viewing. But remote viewing was the primary focus of the project. This was the aspect of ESP they were most concerned about figuring out,

Jordan Harbinger: because the thinking is that if you can master remote viewing, you have a massive edge on all of America's adversaries.

You don't need to embed some dude into a fake life for a decade and hope that you get access to top secret documents. You can just have him project his mind halfway across the world and view the top secret microfiche and then report back what he saw. All from the comfort of his Cheeto stained bedroom or something,

Nick Pell: or leaky barracks or whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So how does this even start? Like at what point is some general or whatever in the US Army sitting around and he is like, you know what? We need psychics.

Nick Pell: They actually did [00:12:00] this in response to a Soviet program that was spending 60 million rubles annually. That's about $12, 120.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh

Nick Pell: yeah, it's like $125 million in current US dollars.

It's hard to actually accurately pinpoint how much it is. There's different ways of converting Soviet money from 1975 to US dollars today.

Jordan Harbinger: I've tried to do that recently where you're like, and it's like rubles? No, no, no. Soviet rubles. And they're like, you can use this number, which is like the number the government gives, or you can use this number, which is what it's actually worth on the free market that it wasn't traded on.

And you're like, oh, okay. So, yeah, it's a tricky calculation somehow. Well, 125 million bucks in current money is, that doesn't seem like a lot for a defense project. I guess the technology is people's brains though, which are in plentiful supply. Maybe it's a light lift. I don't know.

Nick Pell: I can't tell if you're serious or not.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, neither cannot I a lot. That's not a lot of money. 125 million. Uh, okay. Now I'm not sure if I'm joking either. Okay. So they [00:13:00] learned the Soviets are doing this. The Soviets did a lot of stuff. A lot of it was obviously stupid. Perhaps that's a big reason why they're not around anymore.

Nick Pell: The Soviets claim that they were getting results from it.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, but didn't we also claim we had like laser satellites that could shoot down their missiles? So I don't know, were they getting results from it?

Nick Pell: Yeah, the Duff Man says a lot of things, and the Soviets definitely said a lot of things, but there's no hard evidence that they ever got any kind of real results from this.

There were a lot of anecdotes, but very little in the way of repeatable experiments. I think something to note about the Soviet Union in general, it's not like you were going to get fired and in the seventies you're probably not going to get G lagged either. There's a lot of bureaucratic pressure to just create bullshit reports, so it looks like everything is great and nothing is going wrong.

I'm sure this exists everywhere. A bureaucracy exists, but the Soviets took this to a. New level of mastery, people should watch the [00:14:00] HBO miniseries. Chernobyl.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Loved it.

Nick Pell: Yeah. It's just great. But one of the things that's great about is portraying this extreme disbelief of Soviet bureaucracy that anything can go wrong.

They're looking at an exploded reactor and being like, that didn't explode because Soviet reactors don't explode. Case closed.

Jordan Harbinger: Yep. Case closed. Reality disagrees with the bureaucratic forum that I'm looking at. So reality must be wrong. You don't have to be clairvoyant to know that an ad break is coming.

We'll be right back.

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It's a tidbit from the episodes. It's very practical, something you can apply right away. And once again, a two minute read. We're not taking all morning for you. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. So back to the Americans finding out about Soviet remote viewing. Why are the Americans so keen on doing this?

Like he said, the Soviets threw money into researching all kinds of stuff. Did no one stand [00:17:00] up and go, Hey, this is obviously crazy. Why are we throwing money at this?

Nick Pell: Well, I'm sure somebody did at some point, but here's the thing. It didn't matter if the Soviets were having any success with remote viewing.

It simply mattered that the Americans believed. That they were having success with it, and the American program starts in the seventies when Deante has ended. That's the period of time when there's better relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Cold War's ramping up again, and along with it is Cold War spending.

So in one sense, they're just throwing spaghetti at a wall and trying to see what will stick. The American government is absolutely fine. With using taxpayer dollars to fund American remote viewing research, if there's even a small possibility that they can get it to work, especially if they think the Soviets are already getting it to work.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes sense. I have to say remote viewing, it almost seems like a marketing term to avoid having to say clairvoyance or psychic. [00:18:00]

Nick Pell: So in a sense, this is just a sized version of clairvoyance where you can sense or see things outside of your body. Astral projection is the alleged ability to project your consciousness out of your body.

But people are generally claiming to visit other dimensions or worlds and go on these weird adventures when they claim to be astral Projecting. I think we can fairly say that remote viewing is just a way of framing clairvoyance in a more sciencey way. In the middle of the 20th century, there's a lot of different attempts to rebrand Psychic Phenomenon out of the world of Woo and say that we can actually study it.

Hence why we have remote viewing protocols that allegedly make it possible to verify whether or not someone can actually do this.

Jordan Harbinger: So what are these protocols? That sounds sciencey and advanced.

Nick Pell: Yeah, so there are a whole lot. I'll try and make this as simple and straightforward as possible so that people can hopefully follow along [00:19:00] without getting lost.

First, they'd isolate the viewer in a quiet room and use a monitor or a facilitator to guide the session. The target, which is going to be a photograph, an object, a location, a set of coordinates, is unknown to both the viewer and the monitor,

Jordan Harbinger: so it's double blind.

Nick Pell: Eventually the target just becomes a string of random numbers.

This is what they call coordinates and the viewer goes through a series of steps or stages to determine what the target is. It's a whole process that runs from basic vague impressions to detailed 3D modeling. They would make clay models of the thing they were. Allegedly seeing it sounds impressive that people are drawing things that are either really there or on a piece of paper.

It's not though, because this is a very old carnival magician trick.

Jordan Harbinger: I was just going to say, my friend Oz Pearlman is a world famous mentalist magician guy, and this kind of just sounds like a less exciting version of what he does, and he's [00:20:00] very straightforward that this is a trick. It is not really magic.

Just didn't tell you how it's done. I know there are psychic shows where people in the audience draw something or write a word on a card, and I've seen magicians do this, mentalists do this, and the alleged psychic can then duplicate it or something along those. How does that work or does that work?

Actually, I.

Nick Pell: In that case it works either because there's a plant in the audience or they've just gotten really good at knowing that almost everyone is going to draw a stick figure or something. Or else they just describe the drawing rather than attempting to duplicate it. They use vague terms. There's all kinds of ways to pull this off, and all of them can be used to account for any degree of success with remote viewing research.

Jordan Harbinger: Who came up with these protocols? Was this a government thing or did they pick up something that was already around?

Nick Pell: The protocols were actually formulated by a man named Ingo Swan, who was an artist and self-proclaimed psychic. He was from New York. He got involved with physicist [00:21:00] Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute, which has a lot of connections to the American military and government.

Swan worked with Puthoff to develop, coordinate remote viewing. In fact, Swan. It's kind of the driver for all these attempts to make remote viewing into a science. If you want to credit or blame anyone for turning this from a fringe occult belief to something the United States government is studying, SWAN is the guy.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So does Stanford Research Institute have anything to do with Stanford University? 'cause. That'd be a little surprising. It's a little too credible for me,

Nick Pell: sort of the Stanford Research Institute was founded by trustees of the university, but it's been fully independent since the seventies. Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff were originally physicists and not everything that was happening at Stanford Research was related to psychic phenomenon.

In fact, very little of it was, but they got a lot of attention for what they were doing because they worked with [00:22:00] Yuri Geller.

Jordan Harbinger: Uh, he's the guy who used to go on the Tonight Show and be like, I'm going to bend a spoon with my mind. He's obviously a very talented magician and mentalist or whatever it is, and I could be wrong here, but if memory serves, he doesn't outright say these are tricks.

And you, that's like most magicians will say, this is a trick when pen and teller shoot a gun and the teller catches the bullet in his teeth if they tell you it's a trick. And I think Uri is like, I do real magic. And it's like part show. But then he's like willing to offer his services as a consultant for oil companies.

'cause he can divine where oil is in the ground. There's a little sort of shade of like, wait, wait, wait. You're not telling him the whole truth here. Maybe in a way that's not quite kosher.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And he's been pretty discredited more than once. We gotta be careful 'cause he is also very litigious. But his connection with Stanford research is actually really important because.

He was the main subject of a 1974 article in Nature. This is a really [00:23:00] prestigious and serious science journal, and it's kind of the high watermark for the institute's psychic research, but it also exposes their bad methodology to the broader scientific community. So Geller totally humiliates himself on the Tonight Show where he can't perform anything but excuses for Johnny Carson and the audience.

He was completely exposed by James Randy as

Jordan Harbinger: not doing real magic, let's put it that way.

Nick Pell: Yeah. James Randi is a stage magician who in his spare time liked discrediting frauds and quack science, which is weirdly a side hobby of a lot of stage magicians.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, Penn and Teller as well. And again, who better to do it right?

Like my buddy Oz Pearlman again, episode 1224. I've seen him do a lot of things, not just on my show, but it's always, this is a trick. This is not supernatural. And Penn and Teller, like they catch the bullet in their teeth or they'll say this is a trick multiple times per show. I just feel like that's the way you do it.

I mean there was a guy who guessed [00:24:00] that I was thinking about North Korea as a vacation spot in in San Francisco and I was like, wow, this is amazing. And he is like. Yep. This is really cool. And he was just like a nice guy and I was like, yeah, you're pretty upfront. This is a trick. And he's like, yeah, I think it's really important.

I don't think I've met a magician in real life who won't readily tell you that this is a trick. It's like the white hat Jedi ethos of magicians to be like, this is not real magic. Just so everyone knows that's just part of their thing.

Nick Pell: Yeah, and it's getting a little far afield, but like it doesn't make it any less cool or impressive.

Jordan Harbinger: No, I agree. It's actually more impressive because if it's magic, you just go, not that I would believe it. Oh, it's

Nick Pell: magic.

Jordan Harbinger: You go, it's magic. But if you're like, I'm still like, how did he guess Tom Brady's pin number, what the hell? And then it's like, how did he know the girl I kissed when I was in preschool?

Like that's just outright incredible. Absolutely insane. The fact that it's a trick keeps me that, and he admits it. Keeps me thinking about it much longer than if I were, let's say, a believer in magic. And I was like, well, it's magic. Nothing to think [00:25:00] about here. I can't do it. And he can, the fact that it's a trick has me thinking about it.

I'll be thinking about it for years. Like I was the guy who guessed North Korea. I'm like, where was, was there a camera? Did he overhear me? Does he have secret mics? Was my friend in on the trick? I just don't understand how he did it and I never will, and I'm going to think about it for 20 years. So I'm with it.

That's the way you should handle it. But I would love to drop some links to Randy and the Carson thing in the show notes.

Nick Pell: I'll make sure to drop links related to James Randy's expose and the Johnny Carson appearance in the show notes. And it's also awesome 'cause it's from, I believe, the arrow when people smoke cigarettes on television.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So he's smoking a cigarette at the desk. I know. I just, whenever I see those clips I'm like, holy smokes. I think Larry King used to do that too, although it might have been before. He was on television, he was just on a radio, but it was like, yeah, those guys were just popping down unfiltered camels live tv, maybe slightly prerecorded tv.

Crazy.

Nick Pell: That was my brand, man. So you're really making me miss cigarettes. Yeah. We used to be a proper country. So [00:26:00] what came out after the publication in Nature was that precisely no scientist had ever seen Yuri Geller bend a spoon that he hadn't touched. In fact, they were letting him disappear into the bathroom with spoons, and for the most part, they were just taking his word for it.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure. That's science. So not totally related to remote viewing, but it does say a lot about the work that was coming out of the institute at Stanford.

Clip: Come on, man.

Nick Pell: Yeah, exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: Were there any other studies in mainstream scientific journals about this supposedly psychic work that was taking place at the Stanford Institute?

Nick Pell: As for other major publications, in 1976, the Journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ran a supportive paper by Targ and Puthoff. Much like the nature article, there was massive pushback. From the scientific community about their methodology.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. In what way?

Nick Pell: The scientific community figured out that they [00:27:00] weren't following standard protocols that apply to experimental psychology, which is a real thing.

One of the main things that they found was that despite claims of being double blind, there was tons of evidence that the viewers were being given cues about their targets. Eventually external reviewers decided that what they were doing did not even meet the bar to qualify as science,

Jordan Harbinger: which I'm sure was just confirmation to a lot of people that the man was trying to shut all this down.

Nick Pell: That that's a common theme that runs throughout this, and I think it's kind of important to note that science is simply the scientific method. It's simply applying a set of epistemic principles to your research to say that they're not meeting that bar is not to say, well, they found some kooky stuff, so we're throwing it all out.

It's saying that they're not meeting the bar for what counts as the scientific method. The more the psychic researchers and remote [00:28:00] viewers are discredited, though, the more people want to believe that there's some shadowy conspiracy to suppress the truth.

Jordan Harbinger: My first reaction is that if the United States government spent tons of money on it.

There has to be something to it, and I know that that's not great logic.

Nick Pell: Sarcasm again, I, again, I can't

Jordan Harbinger: tell. You know again, what now that the words have come out of my mouth, I also cannot tell. I guess it's probably too hard for me to believe, even though I should, that the US government would waste money on just something as dumb as this.

But now, once again, as those words come outta my mouth, it should not surprise me in any way at all that the US government is willing to light. Millions, tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on fire for something as obviously fake as this.

Nick Pell: Yeah. There's all kinds of government programs that are just on their face.

Stupid. This was particularly true during the Cold War when anyone who promised a new way to get the drop on the ruskis was [00:29:00] almost certainly guaranteed an eight figure budget to do so. I mean, and the other kind of like factor in terms of this is like. Money is absolutely falling out of the sky in general in the fifties and sixties and seventies for, but especially for Cold War research, anything that's going to help get an edge in the Cold War, there's money for that.

Specific examples in practice for the people who just think, oh. Nick Powell's, the guy who hates the government,

Jordan Harbinger: which you are, but

Nick Pell: I am. But there's things that I just sort of like, eh, I don't really know about that. And then there's stuff that's come on. This is Stupid Project Blue Book, which was dedicated to UFOs.

There were attempts to communicate with dolphins. There's this whole wave of interest in the paranormal and psychic phenomenon during the sixties. Obviously there's the whole. New age movement and broader culture, but the United States government was not immune to this. Some people in the government were definitely convinced that you could train soldiers to be psychic spies.

Jordan Harbinger: The government may have wasted [00:30:00] millions of dollars on fake psychics, but you don't have to waste a dime. Thanks to the great deals on the fine products and services that support this show, we'll be right back.

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Quick break to tell you about another podcast, the Mental Illness, happy Hour since 2011. Paul, so he is one of the OGs. Paul Gilmar has been having the kinds of conversations. Most people never say out loud fears, addictions, trauma, shame, the messy, deeply human stuff. Some episodes are funny, some are quite heartbreaking, but they're always honest.

I've been on that show years ago, and the guests are incredible in the best way. You'll hear from comedians like Tiffany Haddish, mark Marin, Neil Brennan, along with everyday people kind of like me, who show up and share the real story of what they've been through. I was on the show years ago. Good times.

Paul and I go way back. The New York Times calls it a perversely safe place to talk about fears and traumatic childhoods. Esquire called it a vital, compassionate gem. Psychology today said it normalizes what so many others feel, but are too shame to express. So if you've ever felt alone in what you're carrying or you just want stories that go a layer deeper, listen to the mental illness, [00:32:00] happy hour, wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you for listening to and supporting the show. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable on the website at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday, I knew about Project Blue Book, the Dolphins thing. I've not heard that one's new to me.

Nick Pell: To be fair, some of it is less weird than you would think, like trying to train dolphins to find explosive underwater mines, which works by the way.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, so I think I have heard of it. That's definitely less crazier than I thought. Didn't they recently find a dolphin from the Russian military in the water near Norway or something like that?

I mean, I think we still have these kinds of programs.

Nick Pell: That specific example I'm not aware of, but I do know that yes, they've had some success in training. Dolphins to find things, which is, yeah. That's not telling me that you can see what's going on Saturn. That's telling me that you've trained a mammal to perform a task, which like happens every day.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. This is [00:33:00] the nautical equivalent of having your dog catch a Frisbee. It's not supernatural. It's just cool.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Or like I live in a tiny little town. We got police dogs like you can train smart mammals to do things like, no kidding. I'm not surprised by this.

Jordan Harbinger: Did they ever actually find anything to confirm that remote viewing had any merit at all?

Basically.

Nick Pell: Wow. This is going to be the shocker of the episode. I hope everybody's ready. Drum roll. They did not

Jordan Harbinger: womp.

Nick Pell: And look, I know that this is so anti climactic, but it's the most important part of the story because the United States government spent over 20 years multiple programs with these fanciful code names, and they could not point to a single example.

Where remote viewing produced actionable intelligence.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, so why did it go on for so long?

Nick Pell: I [00:34:00] think a lot of reasons ranging from wishful thinking to government larges to bad methodology. The line item for this on a budget compared to nukes is tiny. And everyone working on it wanted it to be real. The studies were often supposed to be double blind, but in practice they were single blind and that allows the monitor to subtly cue the viewer.

Jordan Harbinger: I know what you mean when you say double blind and single blind, but can you just briefly explain those for people who might not know?

Nick Pell: Double blind study means that neither the viewer nor the monitor know what the target is or anything about it. Single blind would mean that the monitor knows single blind studies have an inherent flaw in them, but that doesn't make them totally useless.

Single blind studies are very helpful at getting us all kinds of information, but in this case, however, the concern is that the monitors eager to confirm that remote viewing worked. We're finding ways to cue the viewers [00:35:00] consciously or otherwise, they could be doing it unconsciously just because they really want the guy to succeed.

The other thing is, okay, the viewer describes something, and so what. It's cold. Okay. Is that like absolute zero? Is that Chicago in January? Is that the Arctic Circle? Is it the inside of my fridge? Cold covers every temperature below 50 degrees,

Jordan Harbinger: right? Yeah. Do we mean hoodie weather or the deepest reaches of outer space?

Nick Pell: Exactly. And you can apply this to so many vague adjectives. Big object. Okay, so is it a Mack truck, a skyscraper, a planet, a super cluster of black holes at the center of a galaxy. What exactly are you talking about? You could describe my son as being big. He's a large 8-year-old. This could be anything.

What the hell is big? And a lot of descriptions were at that level of detail. It's a large cold object. Cool. Is that an iceberg or the planet? [00:36:00] Pluto. I don't know if Pluto's a planet this week or not, but

Jordan Harbinger: yeah. Not a planet anymore, I think. But yes, exactly.

Nick Pell: One actual example of a description was a windmill, which the description of which was a large metallic object that could be like.

A Costco sized can of soup or an F 16.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. What was the government response to spending all that money on something that turned out to be totally useless? Just finger pointing to other people.

Nick Pell: Look at the war on poverty, Jordan. The government can flush trillions of dollars completely down the toilet.

There's no accountability.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, government bad, but still there has to be some kind of official response to the government. Spending nine figures on psychic super spies that turned out to be completely fake.

Nick Pell: CIA hired the American Institutes for research to look at the programs as a whole. The two main researchers were Jessica Utz, who was a pro parapsychology statistician, and Ray Hyman, a skeptical psychologist.

[00:37:00] What they found was that the studies were, and I quote statistically interesting, whatever that means. But they were operationally useless. There was absolutely nothing they could use. Remote viewers sometimes accurately described general features like a large building, something metallic or near water.

Again, near water is like there could be a pool down the street, but there wasn't a single case where remote viewing gave unique. Verifiable information. These studies were junk.

Jordan Harbinger: What did they get? That was what? What was it? Statistically interesting or at the very least, interesting. What did they find?

Nick Pell: One of the big things that the supporters of remote viewing point to is a man named Pat Price saying there was a crane near a Soviet nuclear facility.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So was there a crane near a Soviet nuclear facility?

Nick Pell: There was, but pictures of it had already leaked. He could have seen them and [00:38:00] either way. Cool man. Crane near a Soviet nuclear facility. So what, how many Soviet nuclear facilities are there? How many of them have had a crane near them At some point I would bet damn near, close to all of them have had a crane by them at some point.

So to give this a little extra color, pat Price was a former police officer who claimed that he was seeing underground bases guarded by aliens.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh wow. I think I know the answer to this, but were there aliens guarding underground bases?

Nick Pell: Not that we ever found. Pat Price died of a heart attack in Las Vegas, which his supporters claim was a government hit.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. The government always uses cocaine and strippers to take their victims out in Vegas. Honestly, looking at all your examples, I could get that level of accuracy if I tried. Ah, there's a big piece of equipment near a big smoke stack looking thing at a nuclear facility, and it's like Correct. Literally every single

Nick Pell: week.

Yeah. [00:39:00] There's millions of dollars in government contracts just waiting for you. Sadly, they stopped handing them out in 1995, so there money in the banana stand. There are other examples that proponents will point to like finding hostages or missing planes, but all of these broke down under closer scrutiny.

There's several things at work making, remote viewing have the veneer of legitimacy. First, there's what's called athenia a good word to know because it's the tendency of the human brain to want to find patterns.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay? Seeing clouds that are shaped like things or seeing a face in a clock or something that's not really there, right?

Is that what you're talking about?

Nick Pell: Your brain is just hardwired to find patterns. So if you look at any random data. You're going to start making connections, so what doesn't mean anything?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, like the guy, John was his name, John Nash in a Beautiful Mind and he's got the string that are connecting all the things that aren't there on the corkboard.

He was like mentally ill and people [00:40:00] found that.

Nick Pell: Look, I read William Burrows at Too Young of an Age, and he's got a whole thing that he calls the 23 Enigma and how you're going to see the number 23 everywhere, and it's like, yeah, I'm going to see it everywhere now because you told me to see it.

Jordan Harbinger: Confirmation bias or whatever it's called.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Which is another thing that's involved in this, which is retroactive confirmation. So, for example, Swan said that Jupiter, as in the planet, had rings before the Voyager saw that there were super faint rings there, and it's like did he predict that maybe he probably just got lucky? What a lot of remote viewers described could be considered Barnum statements.

These are statements that are generic enough that they could be describing just about anything, and this was a lot of what remote viewing described. Experiment or bias always impacts studies and it's wide. Double blind protocols are so important, especially when you're studying something as bizarre as a remote viewing.

Finally, [00:41:00] Occam's Razors simple explanations were just better than fanciful ones. Random chance and lucky guessing are just simpler than having to believe in some elaborate mythos about how remote viewing supposedly works. The CIA said, and I'm quoting, begin the quote, no remote viewing report ever provided.

Actionable intelligence, end quote. The few apparent hits were indistinguishable from chance or lucky guessing,

Jordan Harbinger: so it's good work if you can get it. I suppose for anyone wanting to know more, the CIA's 1995 Stargate documents, those are declassified and available online now, as is the report from the American Institutes for Research.

Skeptical critiques by Ray Hyman and others are likewise available online. We can drop some of those in the show notes as well.

Nick Pell: Before we move on from this, I do want to just briefly say that there's also an authority halo. These studies had real scientists are working on it in senior officers. While the anecdotes felt [00:42:00] somewhat compelling to some people, it wasn't as if no one was complaining about it.

One DIA memo complained that remote viewing reports produced. Excessive generalities and require too much interpretation to be of operational use.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you could say that again. There's definitely a lot of weird science projects that were going on in the military and intelligence communities during the Cold War, but this one just strikes me as especially odd because they, they just got absolutely nothing in the way of results.

Nick Pell: Right, like so at least MK Ultra tells us you can psychically torture a promising young math student at Harvard into becoming the Unabomber.

Jordan Harbinger: Wait, really?

Nick Pell: Oh yeah, man, uncle Ted was an MK Ultra test subject.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. You man, you know a lot about the Unabomber.

Nick Pell: He's the most important thinker of post-war America, and you can fight me on that.

Jordan Harbinger: Anyway, in any event, I guess I see your point that even MK Ultra did something. Even if there's something that it did wasn't what they expected. This, [00:43:00] on the other hand though, this just seems like they just flushed that money down the toilet. So what happened after they closed up shop on Stargate and other projects?

I get the sense these scientists, they didn't just go gently into the good night of normal private sector employment. They're not reformulating toothpaste or whatever, right?

Nick Pell: No, no, no. Like any government program that's been cut that has an actual private sector demand, they went commercial.

Jordan Harbinger: So what training people how to do remote viewing from the comfort of their home in 12 easy lessons.

You get a zoom course from these guys.

Nick Pell: Yeah, that's basically it. Joseph McMonagle. Who was one of the first people recruited for the Stargate program. He kept the faith. He said it totally worked. And not only that, you could use it to see the future of the past. He currently sells programs on mastering, remote viewing among other things.

And some courses will tell you how to remote view the stock market.

Jordan Harbinger: And I assume that course is free because he's so rich himself from remote viewing the stock market that he doesn't need any money. Right. So how [00:44:00] much do these programs cost actually.

Nick Pell: As a decide anyone selling trading programs sucks at trading, and that's why they're selling programs and not trading.

Jordan Harbinger: Of course. Yeah, like if you have an in on the next Bitcoin, like what you're doing is bag borrow and steal money to invest in it, not teaching people a course on how to spot the next Bitcoin.

Nick Pell: Yeah, so the courses on how to, I don't know about HA hacking the stock market with remote viewing, but the courses range anywhere from $79 for three hours all the way up to about 3000.

But to take the master course, you have to buy all the lower level courses, so it adds up pretty. Quickly, if you're fully invested in it, you can also pay for one-on-one training with senior instructors like McMonagle.

Jordan Harbinger: That sounds somewhat lucrative.

Nick Pell: Other people were not quite so shameless. Russell Targe made documentaries about the subject that, likewise said that remote viewing was very real.

But they're not skeptical or critical and they do their best to dress the subject up with a veneer of science. John Ronson wrote the book, the Men Who Stare at [00:45:00] Goats, which is historically more accurate than the movie. The book at least purports to be nonfiction. He's just a writer. But I just wanted to include it here.

'cause I do think it's just part of the broader trend of people making money off of remote viewing.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You mentioned the Stanford Research Institute was kind of the hub. For a lot of this. Are they still around today or did they get shut down with Stargate?

Nick Pell: No, they're still with us. They're called SRI International, and believe it or not, they gave us Siri.

Jordan Harbinger: I thought that was the Apple Siri. So that wasn't from Apple?

Nick Pell: No, it was SRI and Apple bought it off of them. The thing about SRI is that they're just generally engaged in various forms of research. The psychic stuff was always just one of many different things they were doing.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So they went from doing some of the most useless pseudoscientific research that has ever been conducted.

And moved into creating important and critical technology that I use literally every day of my life. Mostly because I have no choice, because Siri still completely sucks, but I [00:46:00] digress.

Nick Pell: I don't use it enough, but I'll take your word for it. They were always doing real research in SRI. It's more just that the woo crept in because there was money to be made.

Why not?

Jordan Harbinger: I have to say, man, I'm a little bummed out at how much of a complete and total nothing burger. This all is, I kind of expected it to be. One of those episodes where we learned that there's something to it, or even that it was like inconclusive, but. It looks like we came up really short. It's not even inconclusive.

It's just completely not a thing at all. Full stop.

Nick Pell: Yeah, believe it if you like, but it's no science has ever been done to prove.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's as real as the tooth fairy so far.

Nick Pell: Yeah. I definitely did want to find something for the listeners to grapple with in terms of is this real, is there any truth to this that I can cling to and have some kind of doubt?

It's not real. It's totally not real. The really interesting story for me is how much money people were able to make [00:47:00] off of something that is completely and unmistakably fake. I have to say, I wonder what my tax dollars are funding today That is taking the niche, that remote viewing once occupied.

Jordan Harbinger: Exactly. Do they rededicate the budget to some other kind of mind reading crap or whatever? Do you think they're still researching stuff like remote viewing?

Nick Pell: I think they're researching something equally stupid.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I wouldn't doubt it. I think there's a deeper lesson to be learned here. You can make a study, say anything, and they did just that for years.

Even if the claims made by a research paper seems sound on their face, you might have to dig deeper to find the problem. And knowing the most basic scientific principles can help you cut through quackery. Scientists, even well-meaning ones can and do make mistakes. And in the case of remote viewing, some were true believers who saw what they wanted while others were probably just there for a check.

Thanks to Nick for helping us get the 10,000 foot view of this nonsense. And thank you for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, [00:48:00] jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, discounts deals, ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and this show, it's created an association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger. Jase Sanderson. Tadas Sidlauskas. Robert Fogarty. Ian Baird. Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I am a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Of course. We try to get these as right as we can, and not everything is gospel, even if it's fact checked.

So consult a professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and wellbeing. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. What if mind reading wasn't magic at all, but the result of empathy, psychology, and awareness. In this preview world renowned mentalist, Oz Pearlman reveals the real secrets of influence, charisma, and [00:49:00] truly seeing others.

Oz Pearlman: I know how people think a mentalist is kind of a subset of magic. Misdirection influencing deception, but it's not magic, the things you convey to me. Your nonverbal communication, the way you pause, the way you enunciate, the way I move you in a certain direction by speaking very quick and then going very slow.

All of that is my instrument on how I can entertain you. Create memorable moments, but do things that appear to be psychic. Appear to have no explanation that I can seemingly read your mind. But I can't read minds. I read people. It's not supernatural, it's not psychic. And I want people to know that I am not talking to dead people or trying to rip you off.

I've spent almost 30 years reverse engineering the human mind. It's the skills of a mentalist used in your everyday world. Cold reading, learning all the skills, learning how to manage audiences, learning how people think. If you boil down what my real skill is, it's not fooling you. It's not entertaining you.

It's [00:50:00] creating memorable moments, and you have to define what that really means. Memorable moments are ones that people tell others about, and that's my secret to success. If you know how people think to create deeper bonds and better your relationships and increase your sales, it's going to help your life.

Active listening and using your memory as your superpower. It's the ultimate cheat code in life. You can find something about anyone.

Jordan Harbinger: To learn how small cues and genuine curiosity can make anyone more influential, confident, and connected, check out episode 1230 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.