Remote Viewing refers to the attempt to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means or extra-sensory perception. Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. The term was introduced by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974.

It was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a 20 million dollar research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena.

Remote viewing, like other forms of extra sensory perception, is generally considered as pseudoscience due to the need to overcome fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles currently held by the scientific community, and the lack of a positive theory that explains the outcomes.

In 1972 Stanford Research Institute laser physicist Hal Puthoff tested remote viewer Ingo Swann, and the experiment led to a visit from two employees of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. The result was a $50,000 CIA-sponsored project. As research continued, the SRI team published papers in Nature, in Proceedings of the IEEE, and in the proceedings of a symposium on consciousness for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The initial CIA-funded project was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials including John McMahon, became strong supporters of the program. By the mid 1970s, facing the post-Watergate revelations of its “skeletons,” and after internal criticism of the program, the CIA dropped sponsorship of the SRI research effort.

In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soyster, appointed an Army Colonel, William Johnson, to manage the reinstated remote viewing project and evaluate its objective usefulness. According to an account by former SRI-trained remote-viewer, Paul Smith, Johnson spent several months running the remote viewing unit against military and DEA targets, and ended up a believer, not only in remote viewing’s validity as a phenomenon but in its usefulness as an intelligence tool.

After the Democrats lost control of the Senate in late 1994, funding declined and the program went into decline. The project was transferred out of DIA to the CIA in 1995, with the promise that it would be evaluated there, but most participants in the program believed that it would be terminated.

Among some of the ideas that Puthoff supported regarding remote viewing was the claim that two followers of Madame Blavatsky, founder of theosophy, were able to remote-view the inner structure of atoms.

Nensha, better known to English speakers as thoughtography or projected thermography, is the ability to psychically “burn” images from one’s mind onto surfaces, or even into the minds of others. There are three well known individuals involved in thoughtography or the research of it.

Tomokichi Fukurai, an assistant professor of psychology at Tokyo University and a firm believer in the supernatural, took a woman named Ikuko Nagao under his wing. Unlike his previous failed experimentation with clairvoyant Chizuko Mifune earlier that year, Fukurai was determined to prove his claims as true and decided to work with Nagao’s skill, a talent he labeled nensha, or spirit photography. Unfortunately, Nagao’s efforts were labelled as fraudulent. However, Fukurai was undeterred, and worked with other nensha practitioners but found little success.

In 1913, Fukurai took on a subject that would advance his claims further, a woman named Sadako Takahashi. Takahashi, who claimed to have developed both clairvoyance and nensha through breathing and mental exercises, met Fukurai and soon was able to breathe life into his sagging studies. She was able to convince enough skeptics and later that year Fukurai published a book called Toshi to Nensha, later translated and published throughout the world as Clairvoyance and Thoughtography. Fukurai would later work with another nensha practitioner, Koichi Mita, who was said to create a thoughtograph of the dark side of the moon.

In the end, however, Fukurai’s theories never gained widespread popularity, and in 1919, he resigned his post at the university to continue his research. Before his death in 1952, Fukurai founded the Fukurai Institute of Psychology, an organization that studies the paranormal and still survives to this day.

In the 1960s, Chicago resident Ted Serios became notorious for the production of nensha on Polaroid film supposedly using only his psychic powers. His abilities were endorsed by Jule Eisenbud, a Denver based psychiatrist who wrote a book lauding Serios’ talents called The World of Ted Serios: “Thoughtographic” Studies of an Extraordinary Mind. Serios’ images, which often appeared surrounded by dark areas on the film, were often of typical postcard scenes. Serios was eventually only able to produce his photographs while holding a device to his forehead, which has been described as a small section of tubing fitted with a piece of photo squeegee.

As Eisenbud’s book readily admits, many of Serios’ thoughtographs were produced while Serios was drunk or drinking alcohol. According to Eisenbud, “Ted Serios exhibits a behavior pathology with many character disorders. He does not abide by the laws and customs of our society. He ignores social amenities and has been arrested many times. His psychopathic and sociopathic personality manifests itself in many other ways. He does not exhibit self control and will blubber, wail and bang his head on the floor when things are not going his way.”

In 1995, famed psychic Uri Geller began to perform nensha by using a 35mm camera upon which the lens cap would be left on. He would then take pictures of his forehead and have the pictures developed, to which Geller claimed that the images had come directly from his mind. Stage magician and skeptic James Randi immediately criticized the event, claiming fraud on Geller’s part. Randi states that Geller is using already exposed film in the camera, a charge Geller has consistently denied.

Professional photographer Nile Root was present at the March 1966 session where Serios claimed to have created thoughtographs and states that the small, handheld device Serios used was in many ways a miniaturized daguerreotype maker, creating the pictures in this manner. Furthermore, Root charges that Serios’ wild manner and actions may have been a distraction to insert the object into the device which would then expose the film. Root has since then given extensive details on how he believes the thoughtographs were created, as well as digital versions of the same.

Edgar Cayce was an American psychic. He is said to have demonstrated an ability to channel answers to questions on subjects such as health or Atlantis, while in a self induced trance. Though Cayce considered himself a devout Christian and lived before the emergence of the New Age Movement, some believe he was the founder of the movement and had influence on its teachings.

Cayce became a celebrity toward the end of his life, and the publicity given to his prophecies has overshadowed what to him were usually considered the more important parts of his work, such as healing and theology. Skeptics challenge the statement that Cayce demonstrated psychic abilities, and conventional Christians also question his unorthodox answers on religious matters such as reincarnation.

Throughout his life, Cayce was drawn to church as a member of the Disciples of Christ. He read the Bible once for every year of his life, taught at Sunday school, recruited missionaries, and is said to have agonized over the issue of whether his supposed psychic abilities and the teachings which resulted were spiritually legitimate.

Cayce’s methods involved lying down and entering into what appeared to be a trance or sleep state, usually at the request of a subject who was seeking help with health or other personal problems. The subject’s questions would then be given to Cayce, and he would proceed with a reading. At first these readings dealt with the physical health of the individual. Later readings on past lives, business advice, dream interpretation, and mental or spiritual health were also given.

When out of the trance he entered to perform a reading, Cayce did not remember what he had said during the reading. The unconscious mind, according to Cayce, has access to information which the conscious mind does not. After Gladys Davis became his secretary in 1923, all readings were transcribed and his wife Gertrude Evans Cayce conducted the readings while Cayce was in a trance.

Cayce was one of the early dream interpreters who contradicted Freudian views by saying that dreams can be of many different kinds with many levels of meaning, and that lack of interest is the reason for poor dream recall. He stated that only the dreamer knows the meaning of his dream, and that a dream is correctly interpreted when it makes sense to the dreamer and moves him forward in his life.

His mature period, in which he created the several institutions which would survive him in some form, can be considered to have started in 1925. By this time he was a professional psychic with a small staff of employees and volunteers. The readings increasingly involved occultic or esoteric themes.

Cayce said that his trance statements should be taken into account only to the extent that they led to a better life for the recipient. Moreover, he invited his audience to test his suggestions rather than accept them on faith.

The term mediumship denotes the ability of a person (the medium) to apparently experience contact with spirits. The medium generally attempts to facilitate communication between people and spirits who may have messages to share.

A medium may appear to listen to and relate conversations with spirit voices, go into a trance and speak without knowledge of what is being said, allow a spirit to enter their body and speak through it, and relay messages from the spirits those who wish to contact them with the help of a physical tool, such as a writing implement.

Mediumship is also part of the belief system of some New Age groups. In this context, and under the name channeling, it refers to a medium who receive messages from a teaching spirit.

Channeling became quite popular in the United States after the rise of Spiritualism as a religious movement. Modern Spiritualism is said to date to the mediumistic activities of the Fox sisters in New York state during 1848. The trance mediums Paschal Beverly Randolph and Emma Hardinge Britten were among the most celebrated lecturers and authors on the subject in the mid 1800s. Mediumship was also described by Allan Kardec, who coined the term Spiritism, around 1860.

After the exposure of the fraudulent use of stage magic tricks by mediums such as the Davenport Brothers, mediumship fell into disrepute, although it never ceased being used by people who believed that the dead can be contacted.

From the 1930s through the 1990s, as psychical mediumship became less practiced in Spiritualist churches, the technique of channeling gained in popularity, and books by channellers who related the wisdom of non corporeal and non terrestrial teacher spirits became best sellers amongst believers.

For some mediums, a spirit guide is a highly evolved spirit with the sole purpose of helping the medium develop and use their skills. They assist mediums in following their spiritual path. For other mediums, a spirit guide is one who brings other spirits to a medium’s attention or carries communications between a medium and the spirits of the dead.

Many mediums claim to have specific guides who regularly work with them and bring in spirits. Some mediums believe that spirits will communicate with them directly without the use of a spirit guide.

In old line Spiritualism, a portion of the service, generally toward the end, is given over to the pastor or another medium who receives messages from the spirit world for the congregants. This may be referred to as a demonstration of mediumship. Today, demonstration of mediumship is part of the church service at all churches affiliated with the National Spiritualist Association of Churches. 

Some mediums remain conscious during this communication period, while others go into a trance where a spirit uses the medium’s body to communicate. Trance mediumship is defined as a spirit taking over the body of the medium, sometimes to such a degree that the medium is unconscious. 

In the 1860s and 1870s, trance mediums were very popular. Spiritualism had attracted adherents who had strong interests in social justice, and many trance mediums delivered passionate speeches on abolitionism, temperance, and women’s suffrage.

Because the typical trance medium has no clear memory of the messages conveyed while in a trance, a medium of this type generally works with an assistant who writes down or otherwise records his or her words. 

There are two main techniques mediumship developed in the latter half of the 20th century. One type involves psychics or sensitives who can speak to spirits and then relay what they hear to their clients. One of the most noted channels of this type is clairvoyant Danielle Egnew, known for her communication with angelic entities.

The other incarnation of non physical mediumship is a form of channeling in which the channeler goes into a trance, or leaves their body and then becomes possessed by a specific spirit, who then talks through them. In the trance, the medium enters a cataleptic state marked by extreme rigidity. The control spirit then takes over, the voice may change completely and the spirit answers the questions of those in its presence or giving spiritual knowledge.

The most successful and widely known channeler of this variety is JZ Knight, who claims to channel the spirit of Ramtha, a 30 thousand year old man. Others claim to channel spirits from future dimensional ascended masters or in the case of the trance mediums of the Brahma Kumaris, God himself. Hossca Harrison is medium for a non physical entity named Jonah. There is video of Jonah taking over Hossca’s body and giving a message on YouTube.

While advocates of mediumship claim that their experiences are genuine, the Encyclopedia Britannica article on spiritualism notes that many Spiritualist mediums were discovered to be engaged in fraud, sometimes employing the techniques of stage magicians in their attempts to convince people of their clairvoyant powers. The article also notes that the exposure of widespread fraud within the spiritualist movement severely damaged its reputation and pushed it to the fringes of society in the United States.

Skeptics include atheists, agnostics who do not believe in the existence of spirits, and those who do not think contact with spirits through mediums is possible. Some skeptics say the phenomena of mediumship are the result of self delusion, unconscious influence, or magician’s techniques such as cold reading, hot reading, and conjuring.