on the controversy of remote viewing:

Nay sayers Skepdic: remote viewing
http://www.skepdic.com/remotevw.html

Relevent points from this web page:

• The CIA and the U.S. Army thought enough of remote viewing to spend millions of taxpayers' dollars on "Stargate."
• The CIA spokesperson notes that the Stargate program was found to be "unpromising" in the 1970s and was turned over to the Defense Department.
• Targ and Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute (later called SRI International and neither having any connection to Stanford University).
• Puthoff left SRI in 1985 and Targ left in 1982 (Marks 2000: 71). Edwin May joined SRI in 1975 and became the director of the program when Puthoff left.
• In 1990 the program moved to another “think tank,” Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major defense contractor and a Fortune 500 company with some 38,000 employees worldwide (Marks: 73).
• Stargate was stopped because the government determined that even if there is some truth to the remote viewing claims, it is too unreliable to be of any military value.
• Jessica Utts, statistics professor at the University of California and a beliver, and Dr. Ray Hyman, a psychologist at the University of Oregon and a skeptic, issued separate reports on the Stargate studies. Utts concluded that "psychic functioning has been well established." Hyman disagreed.
• In his AP article, Cole wrote that Utts and Ray Hyman stated that "the research was faulty in some respects. The government often used only one 'judge' to determine how close the psychics had come to the right answer. There should have ben more than one judge.
• May, the director of the program, was the sole judge of the accuracy of the reports and he conducted the experiments in secret (which made peer review and replication impossible).
• Since it was never required for success that the drawing or report be exact, it is always possible that an ambiguous image will be seen as fitting a particular target especially if the judge knows what the target is!
• Need a judge who is blind to the true target
• "He [Radin] is correct that May’s positive results of his analysis of all the remote viewing studies done at SRI can’t be explained by chance. But he’s wrong to claim that “design problems couldn’t completely explain away the results”

• What would you expect the CIA to say about the RV program, especially if they found it useful? Note the CIA said the program was turned over to the Pentagon.
• That SRI and SAIC, both multi-million dollar fortune 500 companies, would take on a "looser" program, strains credibility
• That Edwin May was the only Judge, that he was not "blind" to the target, and that his choices were subjective would be a severe inditement on RV, but is it true?