Clairvoyance is the claimed ability to perceive information — about an object, event, person, or place — through means beyond the ordinary senses and without contact with the dead, distinguishing it from Precognition (which specifically concerns future events) and mediumship (which specifically concerns the dead). The term comes from the French for "clear seeing."
Remote viewing
The most rigorously tested modern form of clairvoyance is remote viewing — the practice of attempting to describe a distant or hidden target using only extrasensory perception. The term is generally credited to physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where research began in 1972, though Targ has said the phrase was first suggested by remote viewer Ingo Swann during an earlier 1971 experiment.
The Stargate Project
Remote viewing became the basis of a real, government-funded research programme, eventually consolidated under the codename Stargate, run by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency from the 1970s until 1995. Motivated by concerns that the Soviet Union was investing in psychic research, the programme recruited a small number of viewers — among them Ingo Swann, Pat Price, and Joseph McMoneagle — to attempt to describe distant or concealed sites and objects for potential intelligence use.
The programme was terminated in 1995 after an independent scientific review found no evidence that remote viewing had produced usable intelligence value, and its records were subsequently declassified. It remains one of the best-documented real-world case studies in parapsychology specifically because it was run and funded by a government intelligence agency rather than a university parapsychology lab, giving it an unusually thorough paper trail for a psychic-ability claim.
Scientific perspective
As with the other subtypes of Psychic Ability, mainstream science does not recognise clairvoyance as an established phenomenon. Remote viewing sessions in particular have been criticised for vague, elastic descriptions that can be retroactively matched to a target, a lack of properly blinded controls in many early trials, and an absence of independent replication under tightened experimental conditions.
Related concepts
- Psychic Ability, the umbrella page for this and related claimed abilities
- Precognition, the future-oriented counterpart to clairvoyance
- Parapsychology