Overview

Published in 2021, the book addresses a question that has dogged parapsychology since the 1970s: can remote viewing — the laboratory-tested ability to describe distant or hidden targets — be adapted to predict future events with enough reliability to be useful? Katz and Knowles answer yes, provided the prediction task is structured as an ARV protocol. The book grew out of the authors’ years of participation in the Applied Precognition Project (APP), a volunteer network founded by physicist Marty Rosenblatt that runs weekly ARV trials on sports, finance, and other binary outcomes. Katz had joined APP in 2013 looking for free practice opportunities; Knowles had been active in remote viewing since 1999 and joined APP in 2010. Both became group managers, viewers, and eventually co-webmasters of the APP site.^[1]

The book is structured as a sourcebook — a compilation of case studies, experimental reports, and practitioner accounts, many published here for the first time. The authors solicited data from dozens of ARV experimenters worldwide, including formal researchers (Edwin May, Julia Mossbridge, Garret Moddel) and informal groups running operational projects on horse racing, football, cryptocurrency, and lottery draws. The result is the most comprehensive survey of ARV work to date, covering projects from the Stanford Research Institute trials of the 1970s through contemporary online prediction markets.^[1]

Central argument

The book’s core claim is that ARV works — not perfectly, not every time, but reliably enough to be statistically significant and occasionally profitable. The authors define “works” as sustained hit rates above 60 percent across multiple trials, a threshold many groups and individuals have reached. Greg Kolodziejzyk’s 13-year solo ARV experiment on Dow Jones futures, for example, achieved a 64 percent success rate over 4,182 trials. The Applied Precognition Project’s sports and finance groups routinely report hit rates in the 60–70 percent range over dozens of trials.^[1]

The method’s reliability, the authors argue, rests on three design features. First, viewers describe sensory-rich feedback targets (photographs, video clips, tastes, smells) rather than abstract outcomes. This exploits remote viewing’s documented strength at perceiving concrete sensory information and avoids its weakness at perceiving symbols, numbers, or names. Second, the protocol is precognitive: viewers describe the feedback they will receive after the event, not the event itself. This temporal displacement appears to enhance signal strength. Third, judging is blind: an independent analyst matches viewer sessions to the target pool without knowing which target corresponds to which outcome, reducing bias.^[1]

The book acknowledges ARV’s limitations. Success is inconsistent — groups that achieve 70 percent accuracy over ten trials may drop to chance over the next ten. Displacement is common: viewers sometimes describe the wrong target in the pool, or a target from a different trial entirely. The authors discuss displacement at length, reviewing theories (precognitive miss-targeting, entanglement with multiple futures, viewer confusion about temporal coordinates) and proposed solutions (tighter temporal windows, stronger emotional salience in feedback targets, post-selection of sessions based on viewer confidence).^[1]

Despite these challenges, the authors argue that ARV’s floor success rate — the baseline performance of trained viewers following standard protocols — is high enough to be scientifically interesting and occasionally profitable. They cite multiple cases of financial gain: Russell Targ and Keith Harary’s silver-futures trades in the 1980s, which turned a profit in the first phase before collapsing in the second; a 2014 stock-options experiment by Smith, Laham, and Moddel that went seven-for-seven and generated significant returns; and ongoing cryptocurrency projects by groups with full-time paid viewers.^[1]

Key concepts

• Associative Remote Viewing (ARV) — A protocol in which each possible outcome of a future binary event is associated with a distinct sensory target (usually a photograph). Viewers describe the target they will be shown as feedback after the event resolves. The target pool is judged blind, and the outcome corresponding to the best-matching target is predicted.^[1]
• Displacement — The phenomenon in which a viewer accurately describes a target from the pool, but not the one associated with the actual outcome. Displacement can be temporal (describing a target from a past or future trial) or within-pool (describing the wrong target in the current trial’s set). The book reviews displacement theories and notes that some researchers treat displacement as noise, while others see it as evidence of multiple accessible futures.^[1]
• Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) — A stage-based methodology developed by Ingo Swann in the late 1970s and early 1980s, designed to train viewers to access psi information while minimizing analytic overlay (the tendency to name or interpret the target prematurely). CRV uses ideograms, sketching, and sensory descriptors to build a target impression incrementally. Many ARV practitioners use CRV or CRV-derived methods.^[1]
• Extended Remote Viewing (ERV) — A methodology developed by Skip Atwater at Fort Meade in the late 1970s, influenced by Robert Monroe’s work on altered states. ERV brings the viewer into a deeply relaxed, near-sleep state and uses a monitor to guide the session through verbal prompts. ERV sessions tend to be longer and more narrative than CRV sessions.^[1]
• Analytic overlay — The viewer’s tendency to interpret or name the target prematurely, often incorrectly, based on incomplete sensory data. Swann designed CRV specifically to reduce analytic overlay by keeping the viewer focused on raw sensory impressions (colors, textures, shapes, sounds) rather than conceptual labels.^[1]
• Outbounder experiments — An early remote-viewing protocol in which a person (the outbounder) travels to a randomly selected location while the viewer, sitting with a monitor in a lab, describes the location. The outbounder serves as a temporal and spatial anchor. Outbounder experiments at SRI in the 1970s produced some of the first published evidence of remote viewing’s reliability.^[1]
• Unitary ARV (UARV) — A variant of ARV in which a single target is associated with the desired outcome, and no target is associated with the undesired outcome. If the viewer describes the target, the desired outcome is predicted; if the viewer produces a miss or describes something unrelated, no prediction is made. UARV reduces the risk of displacement to the wrong target in a binary pool.^[1]
• Computer-Assisted Scoring (CAS) — A judging method developed by Edwin May and Julia Mossbridge in which viewer sessions are converted to text, and a computer algorithm matches the text to target descriptions using semantic similarity metrics. CAS aims to eliminate human judging bias and increase throughput. The book reports mixed results: some groups found CAS improved hit rates, others found it no better than human judges.^[1]

Evidence marshaled

The book draws on a wide range of sources: declassified government reports from the Star Gate program, peer-reviewed journal articles, conference presentations, and unpublished data from informal ARV groups. Key studies cited include Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ’s 1977 report on remote viewing at SRI, which documented 50 trials with both experienced and novice viewers describing remote geographical locations with significant success. The report noted that visiting government scientists with no prior psi experience performed well after brief training, and that distance between viewer and target had no effect on accuracy.^[1]

A 1983 Defense Intelligence Agency report on Project Grill Flame, the Army’s remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade, stated that remote viewing had provided meaningful intelligence on Soviet research facilities, missile tests, and the Iranian hostage crisis. The report concluded that remote viewing generated fragmentary but useful data that exceeded chance and should be used in conjunction with other intelligence sources.^[1]

For ARV specifically, the book cites Greg Kolodziejzyk’s 13-year experiment (published in the Journal of Parapsychology in 2013) as the longest-running solo ARV project on record. Kolodziejzyk made 4,182 binary predictions on Dow Jones futures, achieving a 64 percent hit rate. The book also reports on a 2014 stock-options experiment by Smith, Laham, and Moddel in which ten inexperienced viewers went seven-for-seven predicting the direction of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, generating significant financial returns.^[1]

The book includes case studies from the Applied Precognition Project, which has run thousands of ARV trials since 2009 on sports events, stock indices, and cryptocurrency prices. APP groups report sustained hit rates in the 60–70 percent range, though with significant variability across trials and viewers. The book also presents data from European ARV groups (Igor Grgić in Croatia, Sandra Hilleard and Michael Ferrier in the UK) and from Sean McNamara’s lottery experiments, which achieved multiple small wins but no jackpot.^[1]

The authors conducted their own survey of 106 experienced remote viewers, asking about their engagement with ARV and other applications. Respondents reported working on crime solving, medical diagnosis, financial forecasting, and archaeological projects. Many described remote viewing as producing a sense of euphoria or flow, particularly when feedback confirmed a strong match. Katz recounts her own experience viewing a NASA Mission Control target, in which she sketched men at computers and wrote “narrow miss” and “close call” — the target was Mission Control during the Apollo 11 launch. She describes the euphoria lasting nearly a week.^[1]

Significance

The book is the first comprehensive survey of ARV work, bringing together data from formal labs, informal groups, and solo experimenters that had been scattered across conference proceedings, online forums, and unpublished reports. By documenting the range of ARV applications — from sports betting to cryptocurrency trading to lottery prediction — the book makes visible a subfield of parapsychology that had been largely invisible to academic researchers. The authors argue that ARV represents a shift from proof-oriented research (does psi exist?) to application-oriented research (how can psi be used?), a shift they see as overdue.^[1]

The book has been cited in subsequent ARV research, including a 2021 study by Katz, Grgić, Tressoldi, and Fendley on rater reliability and factors affecting ARV success, published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. That study, drawing on data presented in the book, found that judge agreement and target salience were significant predictors of ARV accuracy.^[2]

The book has also been referenced in broader discussions of precognition. Julia Mossbridge’s 2023 review of precognition research cites the book’s compilation of ARV projects as evidence that precognitive information can be accessed reliably under certain conditions, though she notes that the conditions themselves are not yet fully understood. Mossbridge’s review treats ARV as one of several precognition paradigms (along with presentiment, dream precognition, and forced-choice precognition) that collectively suggest the future is accessible to perception.^[2]

Within the remote-viewing community, the book has become a standard reference. It is cited in practitioner guidelines, training materials, and online discussions of ARV methodology. The book’s detailed treatment of displacement, target design, and judging protocols has influenced how ARV groups structure their projects. The authors’ emphasis on ethical considerations — avoiding financial harm to participants, compensating viewers fairly, maintaining transparency about success rates — has shaped community norms around ARV practice.^[1]

Reception

The book has been reviewed positively in parapsychology journals and remote-viewing publications. A review in the Journal of Scientific Exploration praised the book’s comprehensive scope and its inclusion of previously unpublished data, noting that the authors “have done the field a service by documenting the range of ARV work and making visible a subfield that has been largely invisible to academic researchers.” The reviewer noted that the book’s emphasis on application over proof represents a maturation of the field, though cautioned that the variability in ARV results means “no one has yet become a millionaire based on associative remote viewing,” echoing a point the authors themselves make.^[3]

The book has been cited in academic discussions of precognition and time. A 2024 paper on the nature of the future in precognition theory references the book’s compilation of ARV projects as evidence that “intelligible and verifiable information about the future is retrievable,” though the paper notes that monetary success in ARV is limited and that this limitation does not necessarily reflect a probabilistic future, as many factors are involved.^[4]

The book has also been discussed in the context of remote-viewing methodology. A 2023 systematic review of remote-viewing procedures by Tressoldi and Katz (one of the book’s co-authors) cites the book extensively in its treatment of ARV protocols, target design, and judging methods. The review notes that ARV is one of many remote-viewing designs and that the limited number of experimental studies prevents direct comparison of ARV to other approaches.