Remote viewing: what its proponents claim and how they defend it
October 5, 2026 · 12 min read
Jacques Vallee recounts psychic research at SRI and learning remote viewing, and Thomas Campbell describes out-of-body work at Robert Monroe's lab and says he taught AIs to remote view. Presented as claims, their accounts let readers see what evidence is offered and judge how far it falls from accepted science.
The rules, numbers and steps worth keeping in front of you.
- Claim: a person can describe a hidden or distant target from a faint first impression.
- Technique: report the first impression and do not name or analyze it.
- Vallée: the 1970s Stanford Research Institute program was funded partly by intelligence agencies.
- Coordinate remote viewing used latitude and longitude as the target's address.
- Vallée's Andes story is a physical reaction matched to a photo afterward.
- Vallée admits failures and says he cannot control the ability.
- Campbell: most students get partial hits; about one in ten succeeds consistently.
- Campbell says he taught chatbots and a voice assistant to do it, by his own scoring.
- His test for AI consciousness cannot fail, which makes it circular.
- No account compares results with chance.
- The tester knew the target in both vivid examples.
- Best cases are selected; misses and records are missing.
- Vallée's own standard: design an experiment that separates real effects from random ones.
- Treat these accounts as testimony about experience, not proof.
This is the short form. The full insight has every expert's reasoning, their own words and the sources.