I'm meeting up with remote viewer John Cook to learn more.
What is remote viewing?
Remote viewing is the ability to perceive details of a location
or an activity that is otherwise shielded to you
by it being distant, or it being remote in time or space.
What makes remote viewing unique and testable?
Remote viewing is done under controlled conditions.
The person who's doing the viewing is blind to the nature
of what they're looking at, and it's important that there be
an actual thing that you are viewing.
And so you need to be able to get feedback at the end
to have a looped closure essentially.
Do you get visions, or how does the information come to you?
It's more of a general perception that's happening.
You're getting all sorts of different kinds of detail about
the location or the thing that you're looking at.
It's not coming in in a nice, clean, orderly, visual way.
Is remote viewing an extra sense?
It is a sense that every human being has to varying degrees.
The ability or the aptitude for it is distributed in the general
population probably something like musical inclination is.
Some people can't play a violin to save their life.
Other people, they're four years old,
and they're up onstage and they're blowing your mind.
I'm going to test John and see if he can remote view
a location, and I've recruited a volunteer to help.
So I'm gonna be trying to do a remote viewing session today.
And when you get there, if you could just try to experience
that location as fully as possible,
walk around, look at things, touch things, listen to things,
pay attention to details that are especially interesting,
and we'll see how it goes.
Neither John, the volunteer or myself have any idea
where we are going.
Three distinct locations with recognizable landmarks
were chosen and photographed.
The three photos along with written descriptions were then
placed into sealed envelopes.
After a brief meeting with John,
we travelled to one of the locations.
Again, none of us have any idea where we're going.
Alright, so the target is Tachyon-Ian.
How are you feeling right now?
Kind of skeptical, to be honest with you,
but I'm gonna keep an open mind to it.
We're gonna declare what we call a water gestalt,
which just means that some element of the target
may contain predominantly water.
Biological, is looking at something.
There's a sort of a... a degree of intensity of
looking at a particular thing for some length of time.
Right now I see... I've got the skyline.
I see the waves of the lake coming in.
Descriptors related to the water are that it's energetic,
it's propelled.
And if you listen carefully, you can hear the...
the water hitting the rocks over there.
The structure basically delineates edges of a region.
So it's like there's some function of this structure
that actually is a clear division between regions
for some reason.
In the middle of all this, there is a very specific
upright focal point.
It feels essentially permanent.
How accurate do you expect you'll be?
It varies with remote viewing.
Sometimes it can be spectacularly on.
You can wind up at the end of a session
with three-dimensional clay models that very obviously are
the location that you're talking about.
Other times it's a complete bust.
♪
This is sort of the experience of Ian at the site.
Typically you're looking for somewhere between 60+%
of the things that are said and identified to be true
in order to consider it a hit.
And the idea is when it's on, it's really on.
Done.
I got sucked into this fountain thing,
so if they're not at a fountain, I'm fucked.
(Laughing)
To measure how John did, I have asked five volunteers
to examine his work and compare it to the information
in the three sealed envelopes.
The volunteers have been given two tasks: try to match
John's work with the contents from one of the envelopes,
and then rank their confidence on a scale between 1 and 5,
with 5 being 100% certain, and 1 being 0% confident.
My hypothesis is that the volunteers will match
John's viewing to the chosen location
with a high degree of confidence.
I selected Envelope 1,
and I give it a confidence rating of 5.
I think #1 is most likely to be this photo,
but I'm probably just #3 confident because
the description was too generic.
I selected #1.
Level 5 confidence.
I selected #1.
I gave it a 5.
4 out of 5 picked the right location.
Only one failed to identify the bridge and water.
Under the circumstances, this is as good as I think
I hoped to do, other than an absolute complete hit.
That would've been awesome, but...
I have to say, John, these results are pretty amazing.
None of the volunteers have any knowledge of the experiment,
and those who chose correctly
had an overall confidence rating of 90%.
John's notes indicate that he immediately linked our location
to moving water, and our location is set beside a river
emptying into a lake.
Predominantly water.
He also noted an upright rigid structure, and another structure
he described as rigid with parallel lines.
When you put all of this information together,
he took the water and structures to be a fountain,
which was not correct, but the description also resembles
the rock feature and the bridge.
Overall, John's description seemed accurate
in a number of ways, and my volunteers confirmed this.