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Well, after Ben posted that comment about the excact definition of “near guess” and how important it really was to the relevancy of the results, I went digging on the Ministry of Defense’s website. Since it was a study from 2001 and 2002, it has since been declassified. You can view the results of the 18 remote viewing sessions here in part one and part two. (They are fairly large~about 4 megs~ and in pdf format.) The Ministry of Defense has this nasty habit of blacking out a lot of the pictures, so only four of the targets are left in those files. They do however have examples of what good responses for that target would have been. This makes it a little harder to tell how close they were.
They have all the details of the 18 cases, which are very interesting to read, but its also takes some time. I’ll hit the highlights:
There was one instance of electromagnetic phenomena. This has been a supposed side effect of a lot of psioinic abilities, but the study discounts this one instance for these reasons:
- It was windy outside, and metal objects could have been blowing by.
- Power was lost during one of the sessions, making the stability of the current in the building questionable.
- The fact that it only happened once.
This same subject had some success as defined by their standards. I’m going to have to say that this is an interesting event, but not really evidence for anything.
Upon reading the documentation of these tests, it has become very clear to me that the numbers in the article from the BBC was very misleading.
The 28% number was the amount of subjects who “may have accessed the target in some way” as opposed to how it was presented before in the article, as a close guess. When you look at the trials, the subjects can produce as many as guesses as desired. This puts the results within the realm of chance, so the subjects might have just been lucky.
There were no results that were deemed remote viewing without a doubt by the Ministry. I agree with them.
Conclusion:
These results were really hyped up by the BBC article, and upon further examination, it makes a lot of sense why the Ministry decided not to continue tests. The lack of conclusive evidence shows that well, nothing supporting remove viewing really occurred. I suppose this has been a lesson in getting all of the relevant information before reaching conclusions. The fact that these people failed to produce good results does not however, disprove anything. So I will continue to look for “conclusive” proof.
A thanks to Ben for prodding me to check out my facts a little more.
-Hatter
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Mad Hatter,
It is so rare that someone actually considers someone elses conflicting opinion enough to re-adjust their own thinking. I was genuinely concerned that you might think I was being a jerk by what I posted in my last comment. I am impressed. I only hope I can be as mature and wise myself when people confront me with evidence that conflicts with my own viewpoint.
Here is a thoughtful “must read” from Paul H. Smith, addressing Britain’s Ministry of Defense remote viewing research - Shelia S. Massey
A few days ago when I first read the newspaper reports revealing that Britain’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) had researched psychic skills, I started scribbling down a table-thumping rant about how wrong-headed the research had been – not because it had been done at all (which I otherwise applaud) but because of how poorly-conceived it had been, at least according to the newspapers. Before I published my rant far and wide, someone fortunately pointed me to the actual 168-page declassified report, where I could read a more detailed account of what the MoD had actually done. I discovered that the news stories were embarrassingly oversimplified and incomplete, and that the research was not as ill-advised as reporters had claimed. It was still flawed, which I discuss below – but the whole affair amounts to the latest example of society’s self-perpetuating ignorance of the nature of “psychic phenomena” in general and remote viewing in particular.
Click here to read the 6 page article [pdf format - 1.3 M]
Thanks Bo, that is indeed a “must read” I think I’m going to post about it to alert anybody else who’s been keeping up with the British RV experiments.
Thanks,
Hatter