Debra Lynne Katz, PhD Sources:
Debra Lynne Katz is a parapsychology researcher, remote viewing practitioner, and founder of the International School of Clairvoyance, known for systematic studies of associative remote viewing (ARV) and for co-authoring the first comprehensive meta-analysis of remote viewing research spanning 1974–2022.[1][2] She holds a PhD in Psychology with an emphasis on consciousness and society from the University of West Georgia and has published peer-reviewed research on ARV forecasting protocols, target characteristics in remote viewing, and the replication crisis in psychology.[2] Katz served as president of the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA) and co-founded the IRVA Research Unit in 2020 with Dale Graff.[3][2]
Career affiliations: International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA); International School of Clairvoyance; California Institute for Human Sciences; University of West Georgia.[4]
Deeper dives — Katz:
Overview
Katz’s research focuses on associative remote viewing as an applied forecasting methodology and on the phenomenology of remote viewing experience. Her 2023 meta-analysis with Patrizio Tressoldi reported the largest pooled effect sizes among free-response ESP paradigms in their inclusion set; whether this comparative advantage generalizes to the broader literature or to operational reliability remains a separate empirical question.[1] The meta-analysis found minimal decline effect over 48 years (effect size decline = -0.008 per year, p = 0.015) and no significant difference between selected and unselected participants (p = 0.88), possibly due to interviewer effects compensating for lack of experience.[1]
Meta-analysis methodology and scope
The systematic review identified 36 remote viewing studies (40 effect sizes) conducted from 1974–2022 through database searches and reference tracking. Both frequentist and Bayesian random-effects meta-analyses were applied, with outlier detection, publication bias testing (3PSM and RoBMA), and moderation analyses examining participant selection, task type, agent presence, and interviewer involvement. Studies with interviewers/monitors showed slightly higher effects (0.43) than solo work (0.25), though confidence intervals overlapped.[1]
Katz’s work bridges laboratory research and applied practice. She has conducted ethnographic assessments of real-stakes ARV projects, including Project Firefly, a 14-month FOREX trading experiment involving 60+ remote viewers that failed to achieve profitability despite pre-project aggregate hit rates of 62%.[5] The project’s failure was attributed to complexity in design, poorly-validated baseline statistics (financial prediction groups had only 51% hit rate in predecessor projects), majority voting procedures that degraded performance, and aggressive trial frequency (240 trades in 15 months) that created viewer fatigue.[5]
Project Firefly displacement and judging issues
Displacement phenomenon occurred 6 times where all groups unanimously predicted wrong outcome; judging variability and self-judging exposure to unactualized photos likely contributed to errors. Only Run 4 achieved 60% hit rate when using single entity per trade day, suggesting aggregation degraded performance. Of 249 predictions, 72 were passes, supporting prior findings that fewer trials spaced over time yield better results.[5]
Life and career
Katz earned a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Utah and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Montana. She worked as a federal probation officer for the Northern District of California from 1995 to 1997 before transitioning to parapsychology and psychic development work.[2] In 2007, she founded the International School of Clairvoyance, one of the first schools to teach intuitive development at a distance, offering online classes in clairvoyance, energy healing, remote viewing, and mediumship.[4]
Katz completed her PhD in Psychology with an emphasis on consciousness and society at the University of West Georgia in 2021. Her dissertation, Unpacking the Popular Psychology Controversy, examined the scholarly-popular dichotomy in psychology books and challenged assumptions that popular psychology materials inherently misrepresent research findings.[9][2] She has served as adjunct faculty at the California Institute for Human Sciences since 2005 and was a graduate instructor at the University of West Georgia from 2018 to 2019.[2]
Early psychic development training
Katz studied at the Berkeley Psychic Institute starting in 1994, where she took meditation classes, healing classes, and a one-year clairvoyant course. She trained with instructors including Michael Tamura, David Pierce, and John Fulton. The BPI program emphasized techniques for running energy, grounding, and interpreting information seen in the mind’s eye. Katz later integrated these techniques with remote viewing protocols she learned in the late 1990s and early 2000s.[3][4]
Katz joined the IRVA board of directors in 2020 and served as president from 2022 through approximately 2024, stepping down between the September 2025 CV snapshot and April 2026.[4] During her tenure, she co-founded the IRVA Research Unit with Dale Graff in 2020, designed to encourage informal and newer researchers to participate in more formal projects and to bring more awareness about remote viewing to academic researchers.[3] She has also served as guest host on the TV show New Thinking Allowed, produced by Jeffrey Mishlove, since 2023, and co-hosts the PsiChicks Talk Show since 2024.[2]
Research
Target characteristics and judging methodologies
Katz’s experimental work has examined how target material characteristics affect remote viewing success. Her 2021 study with twelve experienced remote viewers completing 30 triple-blind trials each found that background context in photographic targets affects performance, though the effect direction depends on the scoring method used.[6] Sum-of-ranks analysis showed significantly better performance for white backgrounds versus normal and abnormal backgrounds, while item hit rates showed the opposite pattern.[6]
Target background study design and findings
Twelve experienced remote viewers completed 30 triple-blind remote viewing trials each, describing photographic objects set against three background types (white, normal, unusual). Two judging approaches were used: Phase I item-by-item hit rate scoring by viewers and independent judges, and Phase II sum-of-ranks matching procedure comparing transcripts to four-photo sets. Viewers described main objects (64% of hits) more frequently than backgrounds (9% of hits), contrary to hypothesis. Only 3 of 12 viewers achieved performance significantly better than chance across all 30 trials. Viewers’ self-judged hit rates (M=0.58) were significantly higher than independent judges’ ratings (M=0.43, p=.01).[6]
Phenomenology of accuracy awareness
Katz’s 2026 survey of 122 intermediate-to-advanced remote viewers explored subjective phenomenological markers that enable viewers to recognize when specific target details are accurate. The study found that 89% of participants reported experiencing a sense of correctness about specific target details that were later verified, with 42% reporting this occurred ‘often,’ 37% ‘occasionally,’ and 7% ‘every session.’[7] Among those who developed this awareness, 86% did so independently through personal practice rather than instruction, suggesting a gap in formal training.[7]
Phenomenological markers of accuracy
Recurring phenomenological markers of accuracy included: unexpected/surprising information, persistent/repeating impressions, vivid or unusual imagery, suddenness/immediacy, emotional impact, aesthetic impact (AI), bilocation, and mixed/synesthetic sensory experiences. When the same information repeated during a viewing session, 59% of participants reported it tended to be more correct. Average self-reported accuracy for data felt ‘on target’ was 59%, while false confidence averaged 30%. Seventy percent of participants reported experiencing a distinct feeling when they are wrong that is later verified, with 50% of respondents estimating correctness between 45%–78% (interquartile range).[7]
Expert consensus on remote viewing methodology
Katz’s 2026 expert consensus survey with Patrizio Tressoldi and Jon Akin gathered semi-structured responses from 11 renowned remote viewing experts regarding recommended procedures and conditions for clairvoyance and precognition tasks. The experts agreed that structured training like Controlled Remote Viewing produces more reliable results, with at least one year of remote viewing experience recommended for participants.[8] Consensus emerged on the necessity of neutral, distraction-free environments and blinding procedures, with unanimous endorsement of using multiple independent viewers to prevent contamination and improve consensus data.[8]
Expert divergence on protocol adherence
Divergence emerged between experts advocating strict protocol adherence versus those supporting individual talent and self-developed techniques as equally effective. One expert stated, “In all honesty, it comes down to individual talent, not procedure, environment, or any other ritual,” while another countered, “The signal ratio in untrained viewers was only 20 percent or less at best, while it can be elevated to 75 percent or more via training.” Disagreement also emerged on viewer feedback necessity: some emphasized importance for skill improvement while others warned of potential displacement effects.[8]
Replication and scientific standards in psychology
Katz’s 2025 study examined how introductory psychology textbooks address replication status when describing studies. Content analysis of 12 popular textbooks found that only 23% of excerpts mentioning replicable studies explicitly or implicitly indicated replication status, and 81% used confident language regardless of replication status.[10] Of 30 sampled studies, 10 were directly replicated, 23 conceptually replicated, and 4 not replicated, but none of the 4 unreplicated studies were explicitly identified as such by textbook authors.[10]
Differential treatment of controversial studies
Textbook authors demonstrated differential treatment: Bem’s controversial precognition study (which sparked the replication crisis) was omitted from textbooks, while other controversial unreplicated studies like Milgram’s were presented with confident language. The study identified three teaching strategies: supplement textbook content with replication resources, provide experiential learning via replication projects (e.g., CREP), and assign students to investigate replication status using Google Scholar. The paper contributes to discussion of how the replication crisis has reshaped psychology education while examining systemic biases that may exclude anomalous findings from mainstream textbooks despite their role in initiating replication reforms.[10]
Key quantitative findings
A machine-readable summary of headline results from this researcher’s landmark papers, extracted from the source articles into ESP-Nexus’s structured study database. It reports what each study found; ESP-Nexus does not assess whether the effects are genuine.
| Paper | Reported finding | Effect / significance | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Katz et al. (2018), Journal of Scientific Exploration | Over 14 months, 60+ remote viewers produced 177 binary ARV FOREX predictions; the overall daily-aggregate hit rate was 48.0% (85 hits, 92 misses, 72 passes), and the 152 executed trades hit 47.4% (72 hits, 80 misses, 97 passes) – below the 55% break-even needed for the Kelly wagering strategy. | ES −0.02, hit rate 0.48 | 62 participants; 177 trials |
| Katz et al. (2021), Journal of Scientific Exploration [DOI] | Background condition significantly affected RV performance, but in opposite directions by scoring method. | p = .01 | 1 experiments; 12 participants; 360 sessions; 360 trials |
Skeptical Critiques and Discussion
Critique 1: Critique 1: Foundational remote-viewing critiques (Marks & Kammann, Hyman, AIR/Stargate)
Skeptic source: Three lines of critique in the documented RV literature: Marks & Kammann (1978 Nature, 1981 Nature; 1980 The Psychology of the Psychic) re-judged early SRI transcripts after stripping sensory cues (target descriptions, weather references, distinctive landmarks) and found that judges could no longer match transcripts to targets above chance. Hyman (1985, Journal of Parapsychology; with Honorton 1986 Joint Communiqué) raised methodological objections — selective reporting, multiple analyses, judging variability, inadequate randomization — that the skeptical and meta-scientific literatures have treated as foundational for all free-response psi paradigms including RV. Mumford, Rose, & Goslin (1995) AIR/CIA Evaluation of Remote Viewing concluded that “remote viewings have never provided an adequate basis for ‘actionable’ intelligence operations” and that “a large amount of irrelevant, erroneous information is provided”; the CIA terminated the Stargate program based on this evaluation.[critique baseline]
Rebuttal: Post-SRI RV protocols (1980s onward, including most studies in the Tressoldi & Katz 2023 meta-analysis inclusion set) adopted double-blind judging, randomized target pools, and standardized transcripts specifically designed to be cue-resistant; the 1986 Hyman–Honorton Joint Communiqué accepted a statistically significant effect that cannot be explained by selective reporting; modern publication-bias methodology (3-Parameter Selection Models, Robust Bayesian Meta-Analysis) is applied to the contemporary corpus. The AIR critique remains live for operational utility — well-illustrated by the Katz-associated Project Firefly applied-ARV trading project, which failed precisely the operational-utility test (see the ARV applied-forecasting spoke). Full critique-and-response detail: RV meta-analysis spoke — Skeptical critique baseline.
Analysis. — protocol generation matters; the original SRI cue-discovery critique is well-documented and widely accepted; whether modern protocols fully close it remains a separate empirical question; the operational-actionability gap is consistently observed.
Critique 2: Popular psychology books misrepresent research findings through distortion of evidence and unsubstantiated claims, and authors lack proper credentials.
Skeptic source: Academic psychologists’ generalized statements about popular psychology materials.[9]
Rebuttal: Katz’s formal case study comparing twelve books on ‘Attention’ (six scholarly, six popular) found no evidence that popular books invariably misrepresent research findings. Some popular books handled sources as diligently as scholarly ones, with The Attention Merchants receiving top ratings for source integration. Eleven of 12 sampled authors held at least Master’s-level qualifications, contradicting stereotypes that popular authors lack credentials. Popular books received significant academic citation (1,704 Google Scholar citations total) comparable to scholarly books (2,054 citations), demonstrating bidirectional knowledge flow rather than top-down dissemination.[9]
Analysis. — Single case study with systematic methodology, but limited to one topic area (Attention) and twelve books.
Critique 3: Cheung and Mossbridge’s The Premonition Code fails to meet scientific writing standards despite claiming to present ‘the science of precognition,’ particularly through inadequate coverage of experimental evidence and improper attribution of remote viewing methodologies.
Skeptic source: Katz’s critical book review in Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2019.[11]
Rebuttal: Katz documented that Chapter 3 promises ‘detailed scientific evidence for precognition’ but devotes only 3 pages to actual experiments after 14 pages of anecdotes, relying primarily on a single 1971 dream ESP study. The authors’ ‘controlled precognition’ training system (pages 109-122) is an unattributed adaptation of Ingo Swann‘s Controlled Remote Viewing methodology, with neither Swann nor Calabrese credited despite a dozen existing comprehensive resources on identical methodologies. Financial results cited from Applied Precognition Project Institute showing 215% annualized returns lack crucial descriptive information and omit the failed Project Firefly involving 60 remote viewers and ~$60,000 in losses.[11]
Analysis. — Specific documentation of missing citations, incomplete data reporting, and contradictory claims within the reviewed book.
Influence and reception
Katz has received multiple research awards, including the 2024 Bial Foundation Parapsychology Research Grant, the 2018 University of Illinois Library Systems Visiting Scholar Research Travel Award Grant, and the 2017 Research Award sponsored by the Parapsychology Association.[2] She was co-recipient of the IRVA/IRIS Warcollier Research Award in both 2015 (receiving a $3,000 grant) and 2011 (receiving a $2,000 grant).[2]
Conference presentations and professional affiliations
Since 2010, Katz has presented at in-person and online conferences for the International Remote Viewing Association, Institute for Noetic Sciences, Australian Institute for Parapsychological Research, Society of Scientific Exploration, Parapsychology Association, Rhine Research Center, Society for Psychical Research (UK), Swedish Society for Psychical Research, University of Illinois Library Talk Series, Conference for Digital and Meaningful Living, Conscious Life Expo, and New Living Expo. She holds professional memberships in the Parapsychology Association, Society for Psychical Research (UK), Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, Society for Scientific Exploration, American Society for Psychical Research, Rhine Research Institute, and International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS).[2]
Katz’s International School of Clairvoyance has trained thousands of students worldwide in psychic and healing arts. Her teaching methodology emphasizes structured visualization-oriented meditations, grounding and centering techniques, and progressive skill development through practice.[14][2] She has authored three popular books on psychic development: You Are Psychic: The Art of Clairvoyant Reading and Healing (2004, 2nd ed. 2015), Extraordinary Psychic: Proven Techniques to Master Your Natural Abilities (2008, 2nd ed. 2014), and Freeing the Genie Within: Manifesting Creativity, Abundance and Success in Your Life (2009, 2nd ed. 2015).[2]
Sources
- Tressoldi, P. E., & Katz, D. L. (2023). Remote Viewing: A 1974-2022 Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 37(3), 467-489. [Tressoldi 2023] R001 ↩︎
- Katz, Debra Lynne (2025). Curriculum Vitae (September 2025). [debrakatz.com] [Katz 2025] R002 ↩︎
- Katz, Debra Lynne (2023). An Interview with IRVAs President (Debra Lynne Katz). [ResearchGate] [Katz 2023] R003 ↩︎
- Katz, Debra Lynne; Fendley, T.W.; Grgic, Igor (2018). Project Firefly: An Ethnographical Assessment of an Associative Remote Viewing Project Designed to Create Wealth. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 32(1). [Katz 2018] R005 ↩︎
- Katz, Debra Lynne; Lane, James D.; Bulgatz, Michelle (2021). Effects of Background Context for Objects in Photographic Targets on Remote Viewing Performance. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 35(4), 752-787. [Katz 2021] R006 ↩︎
- Katz, Debra Lynne; Prather, Jenifer; Akin, Jimmy (2026). Sensing Accuracy: : A Survey of Experienced Remote Viewer’s Awareness of Correctness & Being on Target. Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition, 6(1), 67-91. [Katz 2026] R007 ↩︎
- Akin, Jimmy; Tressoldi, Patrizio; Katz, Debra Lynne (2026). Experts’ Remote Viewing Guidelines. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 40(1), 11-29. [Akin 2026] R008 ↩︎
- Katz, Debra Lynne (2022). Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover: A Case Study and Comparative Analysis of Popular vs. Academic Psychology Books. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 36(2), 233-250. [Katz 2022] R009 ↩︎
- Reber, Jeffrey; Katz, Debra Lynne; Tengelsen, Jacob; Schillemat, Peder (2025). Strategies for Teaching Critical Thinking about Replication Based on A Study of Introductory Psychology Textbooks. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 39(3), 319-335. [Reber 2025] R010 ↩︎
- Katz, Debra Lynne (2019). The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition by Theresa Cheung and Julia Mossbridge. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 33(1). [Katz 2019] R011 ↩︎
- Interview with Psychic Development Expert Debra Lynne Katz! (2021). Krishanti. [YouTube] R014 ↩︎
Deeper dives — Katz: