DERREN BROWN’S REMOTE VIEWING EXTRAVAGANZA

September 22, 2009 © The International Remote Viewing Association

In his latest television extravaganza, illusionist and stage mentalist Derren Brown is taking on the CIA’s Star Gate “Psychic Spy” Program. It is often the case in media events like this that those involved have already made up their minds against remote viewing. We hope to be pleasantly surprised this time and find that Mr. Brown and his producers will give remote viewing an honest look. Still, there is already some reason to worry that remote viewing will not be represented well.

First, Mr. Brown defines remote viewing as “the ability for a psychic spy to see through the eyes of another human being.” Unfortunately, that describes telepathy, not remote viewing. No one familiar with remote viewing has ever claimed that it works this way. Even those sorts of remote viewing experiments which involve a “beacon team” of two or three people going to a randomly-selected target site do not involve the remote viewer “seeing through the eyes” of the team at the location.
Instead, the viewer only uses the team as a “beacon,” to home in on the site and do his or her own reconnaissance.

Research done using beacon teams to target remote viewers who are kept blind to the teams’ destination and work inside sensory-shielded areas often shows that viewers pick up on details at the site that the beacon team itself has no access to (roofs of buildings, tops and insides of machines, locked rooms, and so on). And most remote viewing is done with no one acting as a beacon at the target at all. Instead, coordinates or other means are used to focus the viewer’s attention on the intended target without providing identifying information, so the viewer stays fully blind to the target.