40 Targets and the Army's War on Psychic Boredom
By June Hargrove ·
Kept secret until 2003, a report on the Army's attempt to replicate psychic spying shows a desperate struggle to turn subjective guesses into hard intelligence
Intelligence is only as good as its measurement, and when the measurement is a guess, the cost is a dangerous illusion of certainty. For years, a wing of the Army tried to quantify the unquantifiable, betting that "interesting" targets could bridge the gap between psychic intuition and military utility, creating a record of failure masquerading as a scientific breakthrough.
This effort was spearheaded by the U.S. Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity (AMSAA), an analysis organization that provided the Army with engineering and systems analyses to guide weapon system acquisitions. AMSAA was not in the business of ghosts; it was in the business of materiel. Yet, the record shows it spent significant resources planning an "independent replication of SRI experiments in RV with targeting by coordinates," according to the report. The SRI, or Stanford Research Institute, was the organization that had already established the baseline experiments and the judging protocols for remote viewing, providing the theoretical scaffolding that AMSAA sought to validate.
To ensure the process was clean, a body tasked by the project sponsors—referred to in the record as the committee—was brought in to assess and report on the integrity of the experimental design. The resulting assessment is a study in bureaucratic tension, where the desire for a "hit" collided with the stubbornness of statistical noise.
The Heisenberg Analogue
AMSAA’s plan involved a 100-mile radius from which they selected forty targets. The goal was to find targets with features—geometry, color, action, materials—that were unique enough to be distinguished from one another. However, the record highlights a fundamental flaw in the Army's approach: the uniqueness of these targets was "an order of magnitude less than that obtainable by utilizing simpler artificial targets, such as alphanumerics, geometric shapes, etc."
Under normal scientific conditions, a researcher would use a simple letter or a square to see if a subject could see it. But the Army refused this path. The record states that the "impediment to the use of such artificially created targets is the often cited deleterious effect on the viewer of simplistic 'non-interesting' target objects." In the world of the remote viewer, simplicity is a sedative. The record claims the success rate of hits is "greatly degraded when boredom is induced," creating what the authors call a "psychological analogue to Heisenberg's Principle: The more precise is the measurement of the quality of an RV performance, the less likely is the probability of an RV occurrence."
This is where the record earns its irony. To avoid "boring" the psychics, the Army abandoned objective markers in favor of "interesting" ones. The desk's reading is that the "boredom" effect was utilized as a bureaucratic loophole. By arguing that simple, verifiable targets—like a red circle or the number five—were too dull to trigger a psychic response, AMSAA justified the use of vague, complex targets. These vague targets are far easier to match subjectively after the fact, allowing the experimenters to claim a success where a rigorous test would have recorded a failure.
A Scale of Ten
Even as AMSAA attempted to quantify these subjective impressions, they stumbled over the basic limits of human perception. The project attempted to use "numerical weighting factors" to ensure target uniqueness, a move the committee regarded as a "doubtful means to orthogonalize what is probably a non-orthogonal set of targets." In plain terms, the Army was trying to use math to force a fit between a viewer's vague description and a physical location, despite having no idea how the viewer actually perceived the target.
This disconnect extended to the judges. The record notes that the planned resolution for judging agreement between the viewer and the target used a scale of ten. The committee countered this with a cold fact from the public record: "A scale of seven is a clinically demonstrated limit of human resolution." By pushing the scale to ten, the Army wasn't increasing precision; they were increasing the amount of subjective guesswork.
AMSAA wasn't just testing a theory; they were chasing the ghost of the SRI protocol. By adhering to the methods established by the Stanford Research Institute, the Army believed they were gaining credibility. In reality, the committee found that maintaining the SRI protocol "will present a severe limit to the credibility of the ultimate results." The connection is clear: the Army was so enamored with the prestige of the original SRI experiments that they ignored the fact that those very methods were making their own results scientifically worthless.
Signal and Noise
The most damning portion of the record concerns a pretrial exercise. In this trial, a judge failed to match any of the targets to the remote viewer's description. However, the judge did not report a failure. Instead, by "dissecting the viewer's description and subjectively arriving at specific descriptors," the judge managed to find a match based on a "sum of very low correlations."
The record is blunt about this outcome. While the judge viewed this as an achievement, the committee felt it "may well have demonstrated that an apparent high numerical correlation was produced that did not in fact exist." The Army was not finding signals; they were inventing them from the noise. They were taking a series of near-misses and adding them together until they looked like a hit.
This pattern suggests that the project sponsors were prioritizing "plausible hits" over scientific validity. The committee’s warnings about the failure of the judging process were not treated as dealbreakers; instead, the experiment remained in "advanced planning stages." The desk's reading is that the viewers themselves were not recruited for this specific study but were drawn from a pre-existing, undisclosed pool of vetted assets. The record mentions "different viewers" but remains silent on how they were screened or selected, a gap that suggests the human subjects were already on the payroll.
The Hidden Requirement
When a resource-heavy joint effort between the Army and the CIA occurs, there is always an Intelligence Requirement (IR)—a specific question the government needs answered. Yet, this record contains no such requirement. There is no mentioned target of opportunity, no foreign capital being watched, and no operational objective. There is only the machinery of the experiment.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the scientific replication was a cover for an operational requirement. The actual target list and the intelligence value of those targets likely exist in a separate, higher-classification annex that was never released. The "science" provided the plausible deniability; the actual work was the attempt to use these assets for real-world spying.
The CIA's role in this document was not collaborative, but supervisory. The framing of the report as an "assessment" of the Army's plan, with a heavy emphasis on the "integrity" and "credibility" of AMSAA's methodology, reveals a lack of confidence. The CIA was not a partner in the research; they were auditors checking the Army's homework and finding it riddled with errors.
The pattern across the record shows an institution desperate to turn a superstition into a tool. By invoking the "boredom" of the subject to avoid objective testing and using a judging scale that exceeded human capacity, the Army attempted to engineer a success. The result was a closed loop of subjective validation where the judge and the viewer agreed on a target not because they had seen it, but because the protocol allowed them to imagine it. Those who relied on this "intelligence" were sold a precision that did not exist, paid for by the blind faith of a materiel office trying to weaponize the impossible.