Author: Debra Lynne Katz, Ph.D

Publication: Mindfield Bulletin, published by the Parapsychological Association in May 2020. www.parapsych.org,

Introduction:

When I received an email about a new travel grant from the University of Illinois (U of I) library offering funding for visiting scholars to study any one of their collections, I initially disregarded it. I had promised myself, my PhD director, and almost everyone else I wouldn’t take on anything else until my dissertation was complete. Also, I doubted they would have a parapsychology collection. Still, curiosity got the better of me, and I checked their website. There it was: the Merten J. Mandeville’s Occult Sciences Collection. Darn. The application only took ten minutes to complete, but there was one problem; they required the applicant be sponsored by someone at their university. I asked the grant sponsors to direct me to faculty who researched topics covered in the collection, visited it, or used it in teaching. They referred me to Nancy O’Brien, curator of the Mandeville collection, who had been working within the library system for 40 years. While she didn’t know of any interested faculty, she was willing to sponsor me herself. The award notice arrived a few weeks later, offering $1250 to study the Mandeville collection any time over the next year, provided I gave a presentation while there. Shortly after accepting, the UWG Psychology department Informed me they had money left in their travel budget which I could use if I could spend it within the next 48 hours. With both grants I was able to visit U of I for 10 days. Ms. O’Brien kindly arranged for an office for me to use during my visit

By Debra Lynne Katz

Applied Remote Viewing is a term that is synonymous to operational remote viewing, which was the term used in the U.S. government-sponsored programs to denote projects in which remote viewing was not simply being used for experimental purposes, but rather for practical ones in which information was truly needed by the requesting agency or client. I have been an active participant in IRVA, the Applied Precognition Project, and several remote viewing-related social media groups. At the same time, I have been heavily involved in parapsychological research communities. Even though both these have an interest in remote viewing, I became aware of a growing divide in perceptions and beliefs about the present status of remote viewing. From my own observations and participation as a remote viewer, project manager, instructor and researcher, remote viewing communities and the efforts flowing from these are robust and thriving. However, those who engage in more formal, scholarly research have pointed o the lack of published RV-related studies in formal journals as evidence that RV is not what it used to be. When private discussions with the most ardent naysayers did not budge them from their positions, I decided that a more systematic approach to exploring the state of remote viewing today was needed—not an experimental study, but rather one that would be in alignment with other sociological/anthropological projects that seek to understand the practices, norms, behaviors, products, relationships, and outputs of social groups

When I first began volunteering in the Ingo Swann archival collection, located in the basement of University of West Georgia’s Ingram’s Library (which doubles as the university’s tornado shelter), I thought of Swann mostly as a talented psychic. I was aware he had exhibited convincing evidence of PK and was the creator of the controlled remote viewing (CRV) methodology, which I had been studying and practicing for several years. By the time I left campus after spending most Fridays with Ingo (posthumously) for two and a half years, my view of him had dramatically changed. From what I had learned through cataloging his correspondence files, followed by an independent study of his SRI files as part of my doctoral work, I was convinced Ingo was not just a psychic subject - he was as much a scientist in his own right as anyone he had worked with at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the laboratory overseeing the clandestine U.S. governmental remote viewing operational programs that spanned two decades. I’d classify Swann as both an experimentalist and social scientist. I also discovered he was not merely a naturally gifted psychic, but rather had spent an exorbitant amount of time developing his skills and then trying to figure out how he could pass on his knowledge to others, even while continuing to hone his own.