Discovery Lab Answers

10 People Most Associated with Remote Viewing Research

The sources retrieved for this question — including a 1974–2022 systematic review and meta-analysis, a survey of expert practitioners, a 50-year applied history, and a Marine Corps intelligence assessment — point to a clear core group. Before proceeding: the library’s share of the published literature on remote viewing has not been measured, so this reflects the people prominent in what ESP-Nexus holds, not a settled ranking of the entire field.

The ten figures most consistently named across these sources, organized by their primary role, are:

Notes on each

Ingo Swann is the figure the sources treat as the most architecturally important: he pushed the protocol from object-description toward coordinate-based tasking, and his early work at the American Society for Psychical Research preceded the SRI program. He is profiled on ESP-Nexus at https://esp-nexus.org/scientists/ingo-swann/.

Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ are consistently named together as the physicists who launched the SRI program in 1972 and published the first formal results. The 50-year history and the meta-analysis both treat their work as the origin point of modern laboratory remote viewing.

Pat Price appears specifically in the context of the CIA-commissioned Scanate operational tests and the formal nine-trial series, and is named in the structured evidence from Targ (2019) for that series.

Joseph McMoneagle is the government-program viewer most cited in intelligence and applied contexts, with an ESP-Nexus profile at https://esp-nexus.org/scientists/joseph-mcmoneagle/.

Paul H. Smith, PhD is named in the expert survey as a practitioner with specific procedural recommendations on viewer training standards — “people with at least a year’s experience in remote viewing” — reflecting both military training background and ongoing protocol work.

Debra Lynne Katz, PhD co-authored the most comprehensive recent meta-analysis of the field and is named as an expert contributor on scheduling, trial design, and training pedagogy. Her profile and research hub are at https://esp-nexus.org/scientists/debra-lynne-katz/.

Patrizio Tressoldi is the quantitative anchor in recent literature: the 2023 meta-analysis covering 40 studies across 1974–2022 is the most methodologically systematic synthesis in the retrieved sources.

Courtney Brown (Farsight Institute) represents the independent-sector experimental tradition, with a published protocol using a tasking temporal outbounder to test precognitive viewing.

Stephan A. Schwartz appears across the 50-year applied history and the expert survey, associated with archaeological and location-based applications over several decades.

Skeptical critiques

What critics argue. The core methodological objection — represented in Wiseman (2010), which appears in the structured evidence with a null result across four blind-judging trials — is that positive remote viewing outcomes are attributable to inadequate blinding, sensory leakage, or judge bias rather than anomalous information transfer. The structured evidence also includes a below-chance (psi-missing) result from Wahbeh (2022) using a Quick Remote Viewing Task, and a null overall result from Wahbeh (2021) across 534 participants.

What the experimental data show. The evidence base is genuinely mixed. Tressoldi (2023) reports a positive pooled standardized effect across 40 studies, but also flags high between-study heterogeneity. Three of the 23 result rows in the structured evidence are null or below chance. The Escola-Gascon (2023) results are substantially larger for believers than for the total sample, raising the question of participant-selection effects — a moderator the meta-analysis itself examined.

Analysis. Puthoff and Targ’s early SRI results appeared in Nature and Proceedings of the IEEE, lending early credibility, but subsequent independent attempts have not uniformly replicated those results. The Wiseman (2010) null result and the two Wahbeh null/below-chance results sit alongside positive results from some of the same era, and the heterogeneity flagged in Tressoldi (2023) means that a single pooled figure does not adequately characterize the distribution. Which moderators — viewer selection, training, target type, judging method — account for the variance between positive and null outcomes remains an open empirical question in the published literature.

For a broader synthesis, the ESP-Nexus Remote Viewing phenomenon page is the relevant starting point.