Overview

The Mobius Society represented Schwartz’s effort to establish an independent research organization dedicated to the systematic study and application of remote viewing outside the classified intelligence context. Founded in the late 1970s, the organization developed what became known as consensus remote viewing, a collaborative methodology in which multiple remote viewers worked together to describe distant or hidden targets, with results evaluated through standardized protocols and independent verification.

This approach differed fundamentally from the remote viewing research conducted at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) under the direction of Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, which operated within a classified military-intelligence framework. While SRI’s program focused on intelligence applications for government agencies, Schwartz’s Mobius Society pursued applied remote viewing for archaeological discovery, historical problem-solving, and corporate applications. The two programs were contemporaneous but operated under distinct mandates, funding structures, and methodological priorities.

Schwartz’s work with the Mobius Society established protocols that emphasized transparency, group participation, and verifiable outcomes, principles that distinguished applied remote viewing research from both classified intelligence work and informal psi experimentation. The organization’s methodology became influential in subsequent parapsychological research exploring consensus-based approaches to extrasensory perception.

Founding and context

The Mobius Society emerged during a period of growing public interest in parapsychology and extrasensory perception. In the late 1970s, Schwartz founded the organization as a vehicle for exploring practical applications of remote viewing (particularly in archaeology and historical investigation) while maintaining rigorous experimental standards. The name “Mobius” reflected the organization’s focus on nonlinear, interconnected approaches to consciousness research.

Schwartz’s founding of the Mobius Society coincided with his publication of The Secret Vaults of Time (1978), which documented early applications of remote viewing to archaeological problems. The organization provided an institutional framework for expanding this work beyond individual projects into a sustained research program with multiple participants and standardized protocols.

The Mobius Society operated independently of government funding and classified programs, allowing Schwartz to pursue applied remote viewing research with full transparency regarding methodology, results, and limitations. This independence distinguished the organization’s work from contemporaneous intelligence-focused remote viewing programs and positioned it within the broader parapsychological research community.

Consensus remote viewing methodology

Consensus remote viewing represented a systematic approach to collaborative extrasensory perception research. Rather than relying on individual remote viewers working in isolation, the methodology involved multiple participants simultaneously attempting to describe the same distant or hidden target. The consensus approach offered several methodological advantages: it reduced the influence of individual bias or lucky guessing, allowed for cross-validation of impressions across participants, and provided a more robust dataset for statistical analysis.

The methodology incorporated several key procedural elements designed to minimize experimenter bias and improve experimental control. Targets were selected and isolated by independent personnel not involved in the remote viewing sessions themselves. Remote viewers received standardized instructions and worked under conditions designed to reduce sensory cues about the target location or nature. Results from multiple viewers were collected independently and then compared to identify common elements and patterns.

Schwartz emphasized the importance of blind judging procedures, in which independent evaluators assessed the accuracy of remote viewing descriptions without knowing which viewer had produced which description or which target had actually been selected. This approach reduced the possibility that evaluators’ expectations or knowledge of the remote viewers’ identities would influence their assessment of accuracy.

The consensus methodology also incorporated structured feedback procedures. After remote viewing sessions, participants received information about the actual target, allowing researchers to identify which elements of the descriptions had been accurate and which had been inaccurate. This feedback loop supported iterative refinement of the methodology and helped identify factors that enhanced or impaired remote viewing performance.

The Mobius PSI-Q Test

One of the most ambitious applications of the Mobius Society’s consensus methodology was the PSI-Q Test, conducted in 1982.³ This large-scale precognition experiment was designed to test whether group consciousness could influence future outcomes, specifically, whether the collective intention of a large number of participants could affect the results of a random event that would occur in the future.

The PSI-Q Test involved thousands of participants who were asked to focus their intention on influencing the outcome of a random number generator or similar device that would be activated at a specified future time. The experiment was designed to measure whether the aggregate effect of group intention could produce statistically significant deviations from chance expectation in the random process.

The results of the PSI-Q Test suggested statistically significant correlations between the group’s intention and the subsequent random outcomes, though the effect sizes were modest.³ The experiment demonstrated the feasibility of conducting large-scale consciousness studies using the Mobius Society’s consensus methodology and provided preliminary evidence for what researchers termed “mass precognition” or group intention effects.

The PSI-Q Test represented an important methodological innovation in parapsychological research. By involving large numbers of participants and employing standardized protocols for measuring intention and outcome, the experiment extended consensus remote viewing methodology beyond small-group research into population-level studies of consciousness effects. The experiment also illustrated how the Mobius Society’s approach could be adapted to test hypotheses about collective consciousness and group intention effects.

Applications and outcomes

Under Schwartz’s direction, the Mobius Society applied consensus remote viewing methodology to a variety of practical problems. Archaeological investigations represented one major application domain. Remote viewing teams worked to locate and describe underwater archaeological sites, including projects focused on the Alexandria harbor and other submerged historical locations. The methodology allowed multiple viewers to contribute information about target locations, with consensus descriptions providing a basis for directing physical exploration and excavation efforts.

Corporate applications represented another significant area of Mobius Society work. Schwartz developed protocols for using consensus remote viewing to support business decision-making, market analysis, and strategic planning. Organizations engaged the Mobius Society to conduct remote viewing sessions focused on competitive intelligence, market trends, and other business-relevant targets. While the commercial applications of remote viewing remained controversial within the parapsychological community, they demonstrated the practical utility that Schwartz and his colleagues attributed to the methodology.

Historical problem-solving constituted a third major application area. The Mobius Society conducted remote viewing projects focused on historical mysteries, lost artifacts, and archaeological questions. These projects combined consensus remote viewing with historical research and archaeological expertise, allowing remote viewing descriptions to be evaluated against historical records and expert knowledge.

The Mobius Society’s work also contributed to the development of training protocols for remote viewing. Schwartz and his colleagues created systematic approaches to teaching individuals to develop and refine their remote viewing abilities. These training programs emphasized the importance of reducing mental noise, maintaining focus on the target, and learning to distinguish between genuine extrasensory impressions and imagination or inference.

Schwartz’s documentation of the Mobius Society’s origins and methodology provided important historical records for understanding the development of applied remote viewing research.¹² These accounts clarified the distinction between the Mobius Society’s civilian, transparent research program and the classified intelligence-focused remote viewing work conducted elsewhere, establishing a clear historical record of how applied remote viewing research developed along multiple independent trajectories.