Farsight Remote Viewing: Inside the Sessions That Sketch Aliens and Atlantis
A stranger sits down with a blank pad, a pen and a target number, and starts sketching a place nobody has told them about.
Twenty minutes later the target is revealed, and everyone leans in to see whether the squiggles match.
That reveal is the whole show at Farsight, and it's oddly addictive. One session's target is a harbor, and the next is a base on Mars or a crash in the New Mexico desert.
But how is a session supposed to work, and what can a convincing-looking match actually tell you?
Those two questions are the whole game, and the CIA once spent real money on the second one. Before either, a word on who Farsight is.
What Is Farsight Remote Viewing?
Remote viewing is the claimed ability to gather information about a hidden or distant target without ordinary sensory access. A viewer records descriptions, impressions or sketches, which are then compared with the intended subject.
Farsight is the group that turned it into a spectator sport. Its official description calls it "a non-degree granting nonprofit research and educational institute" directed by Courtney Brown, supported by donations and grants, with interests that run from remote viewing to nonphysical consciousness.
Brown is an unusual frontman for a psychic project. His day job is associate professor of political science at Emory University, where his specialty is nonlinear mathematical modeling, and he introduced readers to his other career with Cosmic Voyage in 1996 and Cosmic Explorers in 1999.
Our Courtney Brown profile covers the man and the institute. Here, we'll stick to what happens inside a session.
And the whole thing rests on one rule: the viewer must not know the target.
Why Is the Target Kept Hidden?
In a blind session, the viewer is supposed to receive nothing that identifies the target. Otherwise ordinary prior knowledge could explain the description, and a sketch of a pyramid proves only that the viewer heard the word "Giza."
Farsight calls its house method Scientific Remote Viewing, or SRV. Its public manual index lays out Basic, Enhanced and Advanced levels, a monitor's template for running sessions, and separate "social and political protocols" for group targets.
- Learn how Paul H. Smith explains the methods used in remote-viewing practice
- Get a structured introduction before tackling more elaborate claims
- Use the guide to understand the terminology and procedures discussed by practitioners
There's even a warning label. The page tells you to be "at least 18 years of age and of sound mental health" before using the materials.
A procedure gives participants a structure to follow. It doesn't, by itself, establish that the information comes from the claimed ability rather than from a lucky guess.
The people around the viewer matter too. If a monitor knows the target, a leading question or a raised eyebrow can hand over a clue without anyone meaning to.
That's why the conditions before the reveal are part of what you're judging. A strong-looking match is only one piece of the puzzle, and the next question is how strong "strong" really is.
How Close Does a Match Need to Be?
Suppose a hypothetical session produces three impressions: water, a structure and movement. Reveal a harbor afterward and those details look promising.
Now put the same description beside a few other places:
| Impression | Harbor | Bridge | Reservoir | Canal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Water | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| A structure | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Movement | Yes | Yes | Some | Yes |
Broad similarities are easy to find. The comparison only gets interesting when you ask whether the description picks out the intended target from the alternatives.
It also matters whether you're reading the whole session. If there were twelve details and only three fit, remembering just those three gives you a very different impression from reading all twelve.
A scoring method chosen before the reveal keeps that comparison honest. Otherwise it's tempting to decide which details matter after you've seen what they need to match.
Which raises a fair question about the sessions you never see.
Does Farsight Show Every Session?
Farsight's historical "Mysteries" project page draws a line between operational projects and scientific ones. Both use blind viewers, but the sessions get different treatment.
For operational projects, the page says an analyst may ask for another attempt or leave out a session judged unsuccessful. For scientific projects, "ALL sessions submitted for a project must be included," and the collection process is backed by encrypted, time-stamped files the public can download.
That changes what an audience can work out. A selection shows what the analysts considered useful, while a complete record also shows the attempts that didn't fit.
The page describes those particular procedures, not every release Farsight has ever put out. If you're watching a project, its own method and its own available record are the things to check.
The other thing that changes the game is the target itself.
What Happens When the Target Is an Alien Story?
The same page lists Farsight's older projects, and they're not shy:
- Base on Mars (June 2010) and an exploding planet in the asteroid belt (August 2010).
- Atlantis (December 2012).
- The Great Pyramid of Giza (March 2014).
- Cydonia, Mars (March 2015) and Aliens on Iapetus (May 2015).
- Roswell: Crash at Corona (February 2017).
Subjects like these open up much bigger stories than identifying an ordinary location. They also create a harder comparison problem.
- Explore Monroe's account of experiences he interpreted as travel beyond the body
- Follow a longer narrative about consciousness and nonphysical worlds
- Compare his perspective with other spiritual and remote-perception literature
A known harbor gives you something outside the session to check. A claimed base on a moon of Saturn or an unrecorded ancient event may offer no independently established answer at all.
Several viewers describing similar scenes can look impressive. But agreement alone doesn't tell you why they agree, especially when shared expectations or familiar movie imagery could be doing some of the work.
Put simply, a session can't both introduce an otherwise unverified event and serve as its own confirmation. It needs something beyond the account to compare with.
Roswell is the friendliest case, because there's outside material. The 1947 incident has a long public record, and the released Roswell records give you a separate source where the subjects overlap, though details that go beyond those records still need support beyond the session.
If all of this sounds too far out for any serious institution to touch, the CIA would like a word.
Didn't the CIA Investigate Remote Viewing?
Yes, and that history is a big reason the subject keeps attracting attention. According to the CIA's own account, the agency began its own remote viewing research in the summer of 1972, ended it in 1977, and handed the program to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The DIA's name for it, STARGATE, is the one that stuck. In the mid-1990s the program came back to the CIA on the condition that an independent group evaluate it.
- Read Joseph McMoneagle's account of his experiences with remote viewing
- Explore how a prominent practitioner describes the process and its challenges
- Compare his perspective with other claims about perception beyond ordinary senses
Four researchers from the American Institutes for Research published their findings in September 1995, all 183 pages of them. Their conclusion was that "enough accurate remote viewing experiences existed to defy randomness, but that the phenomenon was too unreliable, inconsistent, and sporadic to be useful for intelligence purposes."
The agency's verdict was short: "We decided not to restore the program."
Those two findings can coexist. An occasional striking match doesn't give an intelligence officer a dependable way to know which information is correct.
That history doesn't decide the result of any later Farsight project. It does mean government interest alone can't confirm a particular account about aliens or the past.
So how do you watch a Farsight session with all of that in mind?
How Can You Get More Out of Watching a Session?
Start with the target instructions and the full set of impressions, if they're available. Keep the details that don't fit right alongside the ones that do.
Then ask whether the description would work equally well for other targets. That makes the comparison more demanding, but far more informative than admiring the strongest resemblance after the reveal.
The material covered here doesn't establish remote viewing as a reliable way to verify Farsight's extraordinary accounts. Complete records and independent tests are still the missing pieces.
You can enjoy the puzzle while keeping that in view. The big reveal is most fun when you've already decided what a hit would look like, because then the sketches get more interesting, not less.
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