This is part 2 in a 3-part series on Remote Viewing. Part 1 can be found here:
https://unsettled-science.beehiiv.com/p/major-reported-remote-viewing-successes
Cold War archives are full of ordinary bureaucracy—memos, stamps, routing slips. And then, every so often, you hit a page where an intelligence-style transcript calmly asks a person to “focus” on a coordinate… and you’re suddenly reading about pyramids on Mars, “entities” on Titan, and something “coming up out of water and flying away.” That jolt—official formatting wrapped around extraordinary content—is the peculiar magnetism of the declassified remote-viewing record.
Remote viewing (RV) sat within a shifting constellation of U.S.-government–linked efforts later gathered under the umbrella label Project STARGATE, with related programs including GRILL FLAME and SCANATE. The best-known figures associated with this world include Ingo Swann, Harold Puthoff, Russell Targ, Joe McMoneagle, Pat Price, and Paul H. Smith—but many declassified session documents do not name viewers, using role labels or initials and redacting key identifiers.
The most famous “space + deep past” document is the transcript titled “MARS EXPLORATION” (May 22, 1984). It states the target was placed in a sealed envelope, “The planet Mars”, with a “time of interest” of “approximately 1 million years B.C.” The session’s first coordinate (40.89°N, 9.55°W) yields an immediate “pyramid” impression, followed by “very tall, thin” “people,” shelter-like structures, and an apocalyptic migration vibe. A sober warning hangs over this case: the coordinate sits near Cydonia, a region saturated with “Face on Mars” pop-mythology. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory notes that the nearby “D&M Pyramid” landform, located near 40.7°N, 9.6°W, is “popularly known” but “not really shaped like a pyramid.” European Space Agency likewise situates Cydonia at ~40.75°N, 350.54°E, underscoring how close the session cue is to the most culturally “contaminated” patch of Martian real estate.
Aliens appear most starkly in “DESCRIPTION OF PERSONNEL ASSOCIATED ‘ET’ BASES” (Jan 28, 1987): a typed page claiming the viewer encountered “three types of entities” linked to bases at “Titan,” Mount Hayes, and “South America/Africa.” The descriptions read like sci‑fi casting notes, technicians at consoles, a “supervisory” woman in a lab coat, and a “very inhuman…almost robot-like” figure. Yet the file offers no independent corroboration inside the document: no verifiable target packets, no external cross-checks, and heavy reliance on narrative detail.
UFOs surface as sketches and fragmentary notes in the 1984 “Seabed UFO Base” pages: multiple disc-like drawings labeled “flying saucer,” plus the line “something coming up out of water and flying away.” The evidentiary problem is visible on the page, targets and identifiers blacked out—leaving readers with vivid imagery but weak auditability.
Then there’s the operatic “Galactic Federation HQS” training session (Jan 13, 1988), whose “SESSION SUMMARY” describes a round structure with “rays,” cavern-like interiors, corridors with explicit “AOL” (analytic overlay) tags, and a room with white-robed figures focused on a platform like an altar. Even the session data sheet labels the “Actual site” as “Galactic Federation Headquarters,” while the viewer remains only “MR.”
Future-seeing is where RV meets the hard wall of checkable reality. A Dec 1980 “DC‑29” transcript instructs the viewer to move “ahead through time at 24 hour intervals” and scan successive days for significant events—an explicit time-forward protocol in black-and-white. Later, “topical search” tasking formalizes a “future time window” of 1 to 6 days after a session. The most dramatic example is Apr 13, 1993: a session summary predicts that Mount Suribachi will erupt at “0300 hours” on “23 APR 93,” with mass casualties and a “7 plus” Richter figure. But the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program record for Ioto lists an uncertain eruption in Oct–Nov 1993, not April—an uncomfortable mismatch for a prediction that specific.
So how should we weigh this strange literature? Even an internal program review warns that “remote viewing of future events—‘precognition’—evidently violates causality,” and it flags the specter of “inadvertent cueing” as an alternative to paranormal explanation. The later American Institutes for Research evaluation (1995) goes further: it concludes that direct evidence attributing the effects to paranormal ability “has not been provided,” and it argues the operational product was inconsistent and not actionable.
One last caution: a memoir is not a transcript. Swann’s book Penetration is often invoked for Moon-related claims, but even a review by the Society for Psychical Research frames the “dark side of the Moon” story as a personal narrative and notes repeated, unsuccessful FOIA attempts to obtain documents about the alleged project.
Takeaway: The declassified RV record is a compelling cultural artifact—packed with dramatic claims—but, case by case, it repeatedly collides with redactions, contamination risk, and thin or failing corroboration when the targets are checkable.