II. Remote Perception

In another class of studies, the ability of human participants to acquire information about spatially and temporally remote geographical targets, otherwise inaccessible by any of the usual sensory channels, has been thoroughly demonstrated over several hundred carefully conducted experiments.  The protocol requires one participant, the “agent,” to be stationed at a randomly selected location at a given time, and there to observe and record impressions of the details and ambience of the scene.  A second participant, the “percipient,” located far from the scene and with no prior information about it, tries to sense its composition and character and to report these in a similar format to the agent’s description.

Even casual comparison of the agent and percipient narratives produced in this body of experiments reveals striking correspondences in both their general and specific aspects, indicative of some anomalous channel of information acquisition, well beyond any chance expectation.  Incisive analytical techniques have been developed and applied to these data to establish more precisely the quantity and quality of objective and subjective information acquired and to guide the design of more effective experiments.  Beyond confirming the validity of this anomalous mode of information acquisition, these analyses demonstrate that this capacity of human consciousness is also largely independent of the distance between the percipient and the target, and similarly independent of the time between the specification of the target and the perception effort.

Over its long history, PEAR has accumulated over 650 remote perception trials, performed over several phases of investigation. Numerous scoring methods have involved various arrays of descriptor queries that have been addressed to both the physical targets and the percipients' subjective descriptions thereof, the responses to which have provided the basis for numerical evaluation and statistical assessment of the degree of anomalous information acquired under a variety of experimental protocols. Twenty-four such recipes have been employed, with queries posed in binary, ternary, quaternary, and ten-level distributive formats. Thus treated, the composite database yields a probability against chance of approximately three parts in ten billion.

The overall results are not noticeably affected by any of the secondary protocol parameters tested, or by variations in descriptor effectiveness, possible participant response biases, target distances from the percipients, or time intervals between perception efforts and target visitations by the agents. However, over the evolution of the analysis programs there has been a striking diminution of the anomalous yield that appears to be associated with the participants' growing attention to, and dependence upon, the progressively more detailed descriptor formats. An intrinsic complementarity is thereby suggested between the analytical and intuitive aspects of the remote perception process that appears to limit the extent to which such anomalous effects can be simultaneously produced and evaluated (Information and Uncertainty in Remote Perception Research).