Discovery Lab Answers

Paul H. Smith, PhD is a retired US Army Major and seven-year operational remote viewer in the US government’s classified Stargate program, and is profiled on ESP-Nexus at Paul H. Smith, PhD.

The sources retrieved for this question are primarily book reviews authored by Smith ^[1][2] and several papers by unrelated researchers with the surname Smith ^[3][4][5][6]. None of the retrieved sources contain primary experimental data from studies Smith designed, ran, or co-authored as a parapsychology researcher. What follows draws on the ESP-Nexus page for Smith and the retrieved sources where they apply, and is explicit about where the retrieved excerpts do not reach.

Experiments

The ESP-Nexus page describes Smith’s core experimental and operational role as that of a working remote viewer within the Stargate program rather than as a laboratory experimenter designing controlled trials. His contributions to the research record fall into several areas:

• Operational remote viewing under Stargate — Smith served as one of the program’s core operational viewers for seven years, conducting remote viewing sessions under intelligence-tasking conditions as part of the US Army unit at Fort Meade. The ESP-Nexus page notes that program officers such as Smith describe Russell Targ’s SRI work as the foundation of their careers as government viewers.
• CRV protocol development and documentation — Smith was trained in Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) by Ingo Swann, the originator of the coordinate remote viewing methodology, and subsequently developed and published the Coordinate Remote Viewing training manual, establishing the protocol in documented form.
• Civilian instruction and RVIS — He founded Remote Viewing Instructional Services (RVIS) to transition the military CRV methodology into civilian training. This is an applied/instructional contribution rather than an experimental one.
• Published writing — The retrieved sources show Smith publishing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration as a book reviewer ^[1][2], covering topics including UFO-related government programs ^[1] and parapsychology in science fiction ^[2]. These are editorial contributions, not experimental reports.

The retrieved sources do not include any primary research papers in which Smith appears as an experimenter, principal investigator, or data analyst on a controlled psi study.

Methodology

The ESP-Nexus page identifies Smith’s methodological contribution primarily as protocol systematization: taking the CRV methodology developed by Ingo Swann and codifying it into a structured, transmissible training framework. The Coordinate Remote Viewing manual he produced established step-by-step procedural stages for conducting remote viewing sessions in both operational and training contexts.

Within Stargate, operational sessions were conducted under conditions determined by the intelligence community — targets were blind to viewers, sessions were recorded and evaluated — but the specific blinding, randomization, and analytical controls of those sessions were not part of a published experimental design in the way laboratory protocols are.

The retrieved excerpts do not provide protocol-level detail about any controlled experiment Smith ran or co-ran.

Data

The retrieved sources do not contain trial counts, hit rates, effect sizes, z-scores, or p-values from studies authored or co-authored by Paul H. Smith as a researcher. The passages retrieved include his bylines as a book reviewer ^[1][2] and several papers by researchers with unrelated “Smith” surnames in transpersonal psychology and near-death studies ^[3][4][5][6] — none of these concern Smith’s own experimental output.

The retrieved excerpts do not show the figures, and readers seeking Smith’s session-level performance data or any quantitative outcome from Stargate-era remote viewing should consult the primary declassified Stargate documents and the SRI/SAIC technical reports, which are the direct record of that program’s results.

Skeptical critiques

The sources retrieved for this question do not include published criticism specifically directed at Paul H. Smith’s remote viewing work, his CRV manual, or his role in the Stargate program. The ESP-Nexus page for Russell Targ — whose SRI program forms the foundation Smith trained within — carries discussion of methodological critiques of the broader remote viewing research program, which is the nearest relevant context the site currently surfaces.