Viewer 025 and the DIA's Pursuit of a Target Vessel
By Eleanor Voss ·
A target vessel was tracked via 'solo mode' remote viewing, but the actual results of the mission were scrubbed from a record kept secret for ten years
A crew on a target vessel in February 1990 had no way of knowing their cargo and coordinates were being harvested by a person they would never meet. The cost of this psychic dragnet was a total surrender of privacy to an experimental intelligence method that treated human intuition as a military sensor.
The record is a set of OCR-extracted fragments from the CIA Reading Room, marred by the digital noise of a poor scan. What survives is the skeletal remains of a tactical session—a prompt, a set of coordinates, and a missing result. The document, identified as "9003-II SESSION 02, SOLO, VIEWER # 025" (CIA-RDP96-00789R000700540001-5), captures a moment where the United States government stopped relying on radar and satellites and started relying on the mind of a single individual.
Encrypted Coordinates 200524/972649
The tasking was clinical. The government wanted three things: "Describe the target vessel," "Describe the type(s) of drugs being carried by the vessel," and "Where are the drugs located aboard ship" (CIA-RDP96-00789R000700540001-5). This was not a general request for intelligence; it was a forensic demand for the layout of a ship's hold and the chemistry of its cargo. To facilitate this, the agency provided "Encrypted Coordinates 200524/972649" (CIA-RDP96-00789R000700540001-5).
Viewer 025, an operative whose name is withheld and who provided replies to tasking regarding target vessels, was the instrument used to decode these coordinates. In the world of remote viewing, the "Viewer" is not an agent in the field but a sensor in a room. The coordinates provided the anchor, and the Viewer was expected to project their consciousness to that point in the ocean to describe the ship and its illicit cargo.
The level of detail requested—specifically how the drugs were "packaged"—indicates that the government was not merely looking for a ship to intercept. They were preparing for a boarding action. They wanted to know if they were dealing with vacuum-sealed bricks, drums, or something else entirely, suggesting that the tactical units involved needed to know exactly what they were stepping into before they hit the deck.
The Solo Mode
The record notes that "025 utilized [redacted] in a solo mode" (CIA-RDP96-00789R000700540001-5). In the protocols of psychic research, "solo mode" removes the facilitator, the middleman who guides the session and filters the noise. This was a test of the Viewer's raw ability to hit a target using only the encrypted coordinates. It was a high-stakes gamble on the efficacy of a non-conventional intelligence source.
The irony of the "solo mode" is found in the gap between the method and the objective. The government used an encrypted coordinate—a product of hard mathematics and satellite precision—to guide a process that is, by definition, imprecise and subjective. They anchored a ghost to a GPS point. This tension reveals a desperation in the intelligence chain; if you are using a remote viewer to find the drug lockers on a ship, it is because your conventional signals intelligence and imagery intelligence have failed you.
A Missing Summary
The document ends with a bureaucratic shrug. It states that "No [redacted] are noted" and concludes that "A Summary of that information is attached to this report" (CIA-RDP96-00789R000700540001-5). That summary is gone. The released text provides the question and the method, but it deletes the answer. We have the tasking, but we do not have the result.
This gap is the most telling part of the record. The document was originally classified by the DIA, the agency that provided the original classification for the record, and later approved for release by the CIA, the agency that managed the release of the records. The movement of this file from the DIA's vaults to the CIA's reading room suggests a hand-off of a legacy project. The DIA owned the operation; the CIA owned the archive.
The fact that the summary remains missing after the document was "approved for release" in 2000 indicates that the actual data provided by Viewer 025 is still considered sensitive, or more likely, that it is too embarrassing to print. If Viewer 025 had accurately described the ship and the cargo, the summary would be a trophy of the program's success, a proof-of-concept for the "solo mode" that would have justified further funding. If the summary is still blacked out, it is because the result was a void.
The Desk's Reading
The desk's reading is that this was never a simple narcotics interdiction. Drug trafficking is the purview of the Coast Guard or the DEA; the DIA's fingerprint on the classification of this session points to a target of state-level significance. The mention of "drugs" was likely a cover or a secondary objective for a vessel that possessed military or intelligence value to a foreign power. The government wasn't just hunting cocaine; they were hunting a state-actor asset, and they were doing so with a psychic because their satellites couldn't see through the ship's hull or the weather of the region.
The pattern suggests that the operation failed to yield a physical seizure. The clinical numbering of the "Viewer" and the "Session" mirrors experimental trial protocols rather than field agent reporting. This was a lab experiment conducted in the open ocean, and the missing summary protects the evidence of that failure. A full release would show a series of guesses—vague descriptions of colors, shapes, and smells—that bore no resemblance to the ship eventually found, or a ship that was never found at all.
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the withheld pages are protecting the prestige of the DIA. They are hiding the fact that tactical assets were likely deployed based on the "solo mode" hallucinations of Viewer 025, leading to a wasted operation and a target that slipped away into the horizon. The cost was not just the budget of the session, but the risk taken by the boarding teams who were sent in based on the visions of a person in a room thousands of miles away.