So the UK’s Ministy of Defence was also exploring the military potential of remote viewing – only seven years after the US had publicly abandoned its own programme. It’s hard to believe that there haven’t been other RV projects here in the past and I’ve certainly met psychics who have told me that they’d done government work back in the ’80s. Let’s see if this confessional mood leads to any more such admissions.
Full story at BBC
Update: And here’s the document itself via FOIA request (Thanks Ben Goldacre!)
Also, new developments about the origins of the 2000 Project Condign report into UFOs. The first impetus for a new investigation came in 1993 – interestingly slightly ahead of the X-Files – led global surge of interest in the subject, but it would not be until the wave was at its peak in 1995 that the report was eventually comissioned.
One quote from an MOD source also adds weight to the idea that the MOD were conducting research into other esoteric areas during the ’80s: “For many years we were very concerned that in some areas the Russians had a handle on physics that we hadn’t at all. We just basically didn’t know the basics they were working from… We did encourage our scientists not to think that we in the west knew everything there was to be known.”
“If the sightings are of devices not of the Earth then their purpose needs to be established as a matter of priority … possibilities are: 1 Military reconnaissance. 2 Scientific. 3 Tourism.”
Full story at The Guardian
The evidence that Very Much of real history is being hidden from the masses is overwhelming now. How much longer can the “powers that be” keep up the deception? The next 10 years will prove to be interesting!
Having briefly reviewed the documents, I think it’s fair to say that what was being investigated was not “remote viewing”, but rather the subjects were asked to identify objects in photographs contained within sealed documents, which is something quite different. That’s a slight simplification — the actual procedure was a little more complex, but the point is that it was an experiment of a different kind. Besides flaws in the experiment design, the experiments were limited in that they restricted themselves only to amateurs, albeit those with a professed inclination to the subject-matter. The researchers lacked even basic equipment such as EEG machines, widely available to amateurs such as myself. The experiments conducted were also of a very limited nature: just a dozen or so tests, which even from a statistical point-of-view is meaningless (not that anyone in their right mind would expect a positive result from such tests — basically, asking almost random volunteers to see the contents of sealed envelopes). Even had there been any successes, it could easily have been put down to chance, or otherwise dismissed as statistically insignificant (always the case in such small-scale experiments, no matter the type or object).
Whilst it would be very difficult to draw _any_ conclusions from this experiment, one has to wonder about why the MoD assigned apparently barely-GCSE-level-competent experimenters to this, with inadequate support, when they might perhaps have taken advantage of the considerable academic expertise on the subject. This disclosure does nothing but reveal the existence of MoD sub-departments involved in such research, already suspected by independent researchers who have noticed interest in “esoteric fields”, but who might otherwise have dismissed claims by those identifying themselves as “M.O.D.” as fanciful, or worse. Whether RV claims are genuine or spurious, the only conclusion this researcher can reach is: get your sh*t together, MoD.
P.S. Of course, some people have said that the experiment was set up to fail. But then, why bother doing it at all — after all, nobody is going to criticise the MOD for _not_ doing psychic research, are they?