Schlitz has described reading Edgar Mitchell’s Psychic Exploration as an undergraduate at Wayne State University as the catalyst that directed her toward parapsychology. Under Robert Morris at UC Irvine, she conducted what she characterizes as an early replication of the Targ-Puthoff protocol. She subsequently expanded remote viewing research at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, NC, where she has stated the work “produced the strongest statistical evidence for remote viewing under controlled conditions in the literature.” These self-characterizations are drawn from her autobiographical accounts and should be read as her framing of the work’s significance rather than as independently verified meta-analytic claims.¹

The standard remote viewing protocol as replicated by Schlitz involved: (1) physical separation of percipient and target location, addressing direct sensory leakage by eliminating line-of-sight and acoustic contact; (2) a sender present at the target location during the viewing period, whose role was to observe and mentally transmit impressions; (3) percipient verbal or written descriptions recorded before any feedback; (4) blind judging in which an independent judge, given the percipient’s transcript and a set of candidate target locations (typically five to seven), ranked or matched the transcript to the correct target without knowing which was the actual target. The judging step partially addressed response bias by forcing a rank-order comparison rather than a binary hit/miss judgment. Unresolved in most implementations: experimenter cueing during target selection and the possibility of subtle cues in transcript wording that could allow a non-blind judge to infer the target. Schlitz’s Rhine-phase work is described in autobiographical sources as having addressed long-distance separation as an additional control against sender-percipient collusion, though the specific distances and judging procedures are not fully detailed in the available pool entries.¹

The transcontinental remote viewing study (Schlitz & Gruber) placed the sender and percipient on different continents, eliminating sensory leakage via proximity as a competing explanation. The original study reported statistically significant matching of percipient transcripts to target locations under blind judging conditions.² A subsequent rejudging paper (Schlitz & Gruber, 1981, Journal of Parapsychology) revisited the original transcripts and target pool under revised judging procedures. The rejudging was motivated by concerns about judging contamination, specifically, the possibility that the original judging process had introduced systematic bias through non-blind elements or inconsistent application of rating criteria. The rejudging confirmed the original significant results, partially addressing judging-contamination concerns, though the rejudging was conducted by the original investigators rather than fully independent judges, which leaves experimenter-side bias partially unresolved.³ Specific effect sizes, z-scores, and sample sizes for these studies are not fully detailed in the available pool entries.

The use of intercontinental separation between sender and percipient was a deliberate methodological choice to eliminate the most persistent alternative explanation for remote viewing results: that percipients and senders share subtle conventional cues, acoustic, olfactory, or visual, when physically proximate. By placing the two parties on different continents, the transcontinental design eliminated direct sensory contact as a competing explanation. The remaining unresolved alternative explanations include: (1) judging bias, partially addressed by blind judging but not fully eliminated when investigators conduct the rejudging; (2) optional stopping, not addressed in the available pool entries; (3) multiple comparisons across sessions, not detailed in available pool entries. The proposed mechanism, that percipient awareness of a distant target reflects a genuine anomalous information transfer, remains the researcher’s preferred interpretation; alternative interpretations include statistical artifact from undisclosed stopping rules and systematic response tendencies in percipient descriptions.²³

The intrasubject replication study (Schlitz & Haight, 1984, Journal of Parapsychology) examined whether a single percipient could replicate their own remote viewing performance across multiple sessions. The intrasubject design addresses a specific methodological concern: that between-subjects remote viewing studies may aggregate hits from a small number of high-performing participants with chance-level performance from the majority, producing a significant group mean that does not reflect a reliable effect in any individual. By testing the same participant repeatedly, the intrasubject design allows assessment of within-person consistency. Specific sample sizes (number of sessions, number of trials per session), effect sizes, and statistical outcomes are not fully detailed in the available pool entries. The competing non-psi explanation most relevant to this design is response stereotypy, the tendency of percipients to use consistent descriptive language across sessions that may match a subset of target types regardless of the actual target, inflating apparent hit rates. Whether this was specifically tested in the intrasubject study is not detailed in the available pool entries.⁴

In her autobiographical and reflective writing, Schlitz has identified several structural obstacles to progress in remote viewing research: the small number of active researchers limits the pool of independent replicators; funding constraints restrict sample sizes and the number of sessions per study; judging variability across laboratories makes cross-study comparison difficult; and the field’s credibility challenges make it difficult to attract mainstream collaborators. She has noted that if psi results can be replicated by mainstream scientists, parapsychology may find itself within the mainstream scientific camp, framing replication by independent, non-specialist laboratories as the key threshold the field has not yet consistently crossed.¹

The Wiseman-Schlitz remote staring studies (reported in Wiseman & Schlitz, 1997, Journal of Parapsychology) found that Schlitz’s participants showed statistically significant electrodermal activation during staring periods while Wiseman’s participants, run simultaneously in the same location with the same equipment and drawn from the same participant pool, did not. The specific artifact addressed by the joint design was experimenter-side cueing: by running both experimenters simultaneously with the same equipment and participant pool, the design eliminated differential equipment calibration, participant recruitment bias, and procedural differences as explanations for the divergent results. What remained unresolved was the mechanism by which experimenter identity, skeptic versus proponent, could produce systematically different outcomes in participants who had no knowledge of which experimenter was running their session. This unresolved question is directly relevant to remote viewing replication: if experimenter belief or expectation is a genuine moderator of psi effects, then the replication record for remote viewing cannot be evaluated simply by counting positive versus null outcomes without accounting for experimenter characteristics.⁵

A 2021 multi-site replication study (Schlitz, Bem, Cardeña et al., Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 65–90) involving an international collaboration of experimenters sought to replicate Daryl Bem’s time-reversed priming paradigm, a precognition task structurally distinct from remote viewing but sharing the core methodological challenge of replication across laboratories. The preregistered confirmatory hypothesis for Experiment 1 was not supported. Exploratory analyses found a significant effect in participants who completed the English-language version of the task but not in those using translations. Experiment 2’s primary psi hypothesis was also not supported, though exploratory analyses found that participants who received a pro-psi expectancy statement showed a larger psi score than those who received an anti-psi statement. Neither experimenters’ nor participants’ beliefs were consistently associated with the dependent measure. The preregistered confirmatory hypotheses were not supported in either experiment.⁶⁶ This study illustrates the broader replication challenge Schlitz has identified across psi domains: effects that appear in original studies frequently fail to replicate under preregistered confirmatory conditions, while exploratory analyses continue to find suggestive patterns that motivate further investigation.