The men (and women) who stare at rabbits (Part 1)

by Michael Robartes

The rabbit hole runs deep and provides an endless variety of tunnels to explore. No matter how many wonders we learn to incorporate into our belief system, there are always new RHEs to be found.

I was reminded of this over the past few months as I have been training in Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) with Lyn Buchanan, one of the original trainers of the military Remote Viewing unit that most people know under the Star Gate program and as satirically depicted in the film The Men Who Stare at Goats.

I had heard a lot about remote viewing during the course of my explorations, and I was pretty skeptical about the claims made about it. But as Paul and I discuss in our book, only personal experience can lead to the rabbit hole experience, and this was my chance to explore this corner of the hole with one of the people who dug it.

Remote Viewing and CRV

There are several different types of “remote viewing”, but broadly speaking, remote viewing is the use of psychic ability to gain information about a target anywhere in the world which is completely unknown to the viewer. The target can be just about anything – a location, an object, a person, an activity, etc – and the target might be distant in time or space or hidden for some other reason.

Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) is the original form of remote viewing developed by Ingo Swann for the purpose of training military personnel to use their innate psychic abilities to collect intelligence. CRV is the martial art of the rabbit hole, both in its background and its method. It is a disciplined, systematic method of training and using the inherent psychic abilities possessed by our subconscious minds. The basic premise of CRV is that these abilities are innate to everyone, not just special “psychic” people, and that anyone can be trained to access them.  

At its core, CRV is a process that provides a format for remote viewing a target in stages and is structured to allow the subconscious to do the viewing and the conscious mind to act as notetaker. To begin, viewers are given a set of “coordinates” designating a target and then tasked with describing the target. The coordinates given are just numbers that identify a target and do not contain any information about the target.

At the end of a basic level session, the viewer will have recorded a number of impressions, produced a summary of the impressions and perhaps some sketches representing what was viewed. At more advanced levels, all kinds of detailed information can be gained about a target. The most advanced are said to be able to achieve what is known as “perfect site integration” or a sense of being completely immersed in the site as though they are there.

Initial skepticism

If you have read our book, you know that the approach that Paul and I take to the paranormal is one of open skepticism. By open, I mean that I am not in any way invested in the skeptical position, and I am looking for evidence to the contrary. But until the evidence is strong enough, I feel that we need to assume that there is nothing paranormal or psychic going on.

 The stories I had read about CRV over the years seemed like they were open to a lot of interpretation. A few adjectives or a rough sketch could often be interpreted to be relevant to the intended target. This is a problem of confirmation bias.

Often, testimonies would show cases in which a viewer drew a sketch that was very accurate in detail to the target given. But, if you have enough people trying to view an unknown target, frequently one will come up with descriptors and sketches of a target that seem very accurate, just by chance. Or, if a single viewer works a large number of targets, we might expect that chance would occasionally produce a session that reasonably fit the target. If these successful sessions are the only ones we hear about, it gives a false sense of what is actually happening.

The question for me was whether the results could be consistent enough to reject the null hypothesis that these were just chance successes. And could this skill be taught to the average person? If it could, then this would mean that our view of how our minds work would have to be radically adjusted.

To find out, I needed a certified CRV Rabbit Hole Experience (RHE) to convince me, and the only way to achieve that was to try it for myself.

The first CRV RHE

My early sessions were mixed. Although there were some decent perceptions that were accurate to the target, there were also things perceived during viewing that were not part of the target, and a lot was left to interpretation. When you are writing vague impressions like “big”, “red”, etc. these descriptors will fit many targets, so I was not convinced that I was doing anything other than just guessing.

My RHE for CRV came one night during a practice session when I experienced what CRV calls an Aesthetic Impact (AI). An AI is the feeling of being part of the scene at the target instead of viewing it from the outside, often accompanied by an emotional response to the target. This is considered to be a sign that the viewer has made contact with the target site.

As I viewed the target, in my mind I had the impression of being on a boat on the ocean. Something was being lowered onto the boat and I could sense it above me in a basket or harness or something similar. It is this feeling of things at the site being in relation to the viewer that is the defining feature of the AI.

A visual image that popped into my head was of rescue operations I had seen where a dolphin or whale was being hoisted into a boat. I saw an image of a whale, but oddly, I had the impression that the whale was very dark for some reason. In CRV, we are trained to set aside these sorts of impressions that involve nouns or try to identify the target rather than describe it, as this is an indicator that the information is an Analytic Overlay (AOL) created by the conscious mind. Usually, they are not accurate to the target, but are a function of the conscious mind making assumptions about the impressions received from the subconscious mind.

So as I had been trained, I described the impressions I was getting, drew a rough sketch, and noted off to the side that I was thinking about a dolphin rescue.

When I checked the feedback, the target turned out to be an operation where a ship was harvesting pieces of ice off an iceberg to use in making vodka. The large chunks of ice were being hauled aboard ship in a basket and lowered down to the deck. This seemed eerily close to what I had been sensing, the idea of large things being lowered onto a ship on the ocean.

It was ice, not dolphins or whales, so I assumed my AOL had been wrong, as is often the case. But as I browsed the feedback pictures one struck me: a picture of a giant iceberg with a whale swimming next to it, and because the whale was silhouetted against the iceberg, it looked black.

Notes in red are my review of the session after getting feedback.

Recall that this target could have been anything in the world - a soccer game, the Egyptian pyramids, a bowl of fruit on a table, even a Finnish hobbyhorsing competition. Not only was my overall scene and the idea of something being lowered onto the deck accurate, there was even a dark whale in the mix!

But what triggered the RHE for me was the personal experience of the AI. For a brief moment, I felt like I was actually in the scene and felt something being lowered down from above me, and when this personal experience turned out to be accurate, it left no doubt in my mind that I had actually, somehow, made contact with an unknown target with my mind.

Operations

Hits in practice sessions are interesting, but ultimately there is a question of whether CRV can be useful for real world purposes. This was the question the Army was asking when it set up the remote viewing unit to collect intelligence. Not long into my CRV training, we had an opportunity to test it out.

One of our group members had a friend who had lost an item in her home and asked if we could help her find it. It was not a life-or-death situation, and the worst outcome would just be that she didn’t find it, so we decided to give it a shot and accept our first “client”.

We did not know what the item was that was lost, or even whether it was lost indoors or outdoors or any other information about where the client thought the item might be. To do so would cause our conscious minds to become “polluted” which is a term often used in CRV to describe anything that causes the conscious mind to jump in and interfere with the process.

One viewer drew a sketch that turned out to be a very accurate representation of the client’s dining room, right down to a sliding door and hanging light in front of it. The client did not find the item in her dining room, but the accuracy of the sketch made it hard to deny that the viewer had viewed inside her house. The dining room also happened to be the room adjacent to the location of the item.

I don’t know how I did it, but I happened to be the viewer who did see the location of the item – the pantry. What I saw was a long, linear space. It was open on one end, like a door or window, and I perceived that the lost item was in a corner next to this opening in some sort of container like a box. I was also getting an impression of something white, and the sense that she should look upward above her.

Based on this information, the item was found in a white plastic bin in the corner of her walk-in pantry (the long, narrow space), right behind the door. The lost item turned out to be a box of candles, which I had also noted in my session, but our task was just to describe the location.

This was just some beginners doing rough work, but to have one person draw the inside of the woman’s house, and the other accurately describe the location of the object is hard to write off as chance. I would call that a success, and it makes the claims about viewers locating missing children and such entirely believable.

Test Day

One of the main criticisms of reports of psychic and paranormal phenomena is that they tend to be difficult to reproduce on demand in controlled settings. Psychics are notoriously bad test takers. CRV is designed to work in these conditions, at least once people are well trained in it. Recently, I was involved in a group session that was designed to put some pressure on and see how we fared.

A small group of viewers took part in a live session monitored by Lyn and one of his past students. It was not actually a test, but it had that flavor to it. We were all live on a zoom call (still plague times) and were assigned a target to work. We were told that the target was an activity at a location. That’s it.

We were then given some instructions throughout the session to move around or describe things from specific perspectives. Viewers could not see each other’s work and did not reveal what they perceived until the end, when we had to share our results before getting our feedback. This was a very fast-paced session and we were on camera and working in real time under the gun.

At one point, we were told to move into the middle of the activity and describe what we perceived. Several people described a feeling of being in a crowd, being chased, or hit or similar descriptions. I described it as a feeling of being surrounded and noted that it felt like a rugby huddle (scrum I think is the proper term).

At another point, we were told to move 200 feet above the location of the activity and describe. This was really interesting because four out of the nine viewers drew sketches that looked very much alike (with slight variations) and resemble a stadium. I even put aside an AOL on mine that it was a stadium.

The target turned out to be a hurling match, an Irish sport that is like a combination of field hockey, lacrosse, and rugby. We had nine viewers doing the target live. Out of those, all described some aspects that were accurate to the target, some more so than others, as one would expect.

Outside the consideration of the accuracy of the observations to the target, just the fact that almost half of the viewers drew essentially the same thing seems way outside the realm of chance. Remember that all we knew was that the target was an activity. It could have been anything from a dog herding ducks to a game of tiddlywinks - we have had both as targets.

The Results are in

If the stories shared above were just a few picked from hundreds of people doing sessions, it would be easy to argue that they are just random chance. But these are just three sessions that I have been involved with personally in the short time that I have been practicing CRV, and there are many more stories like this just in a few months.

Yes, I picked stories of good sessions because these are the ones that have convinced me that CRV works. There have been bad sessions as well. But in CRV training, all of our sessions are recorded in a database, the good ones and the bad ones, and the sessions are scored.

In fact, probably the most reality-breaking session I have done so far is recorded in the database as one of my lowest scores. But, we will take this up in Part 2…