A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research

A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances, Historical Perspective and Recent Research, by Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ, published in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1976, is a peer reviewed paper reporting the Stanford Research Institute's early remote viewing experiments, in which subjects attempted to describe distant, hidden locations, and arguing statistical results from these trials exceeded chance. Its strength is unusual venue standing, publication in a mainstream engineering journal rather than only a parapsychology outlet gave the claims wider scientific visibility and forced the wider physics and engineering community to engage with the protocol directly. Its limit is that the paper's methodology, including the judging procedures used to score hits, was subjected to serious criticism by later reviewers, including a formal CIA sponsored evaluation of the broader program, who identified protocol weaknesses that could produce apparent above chance results without any genuine perceptual channel, so the reported results remain unreplicated to the field's own satisfaction rather than settled evidence.