Before I get into why I am even writing about this, it is worth actually explaining what remote viewing is, because most people's entire mental model of it is "psychics working for the CIA," which is close enough to true to be funny and far enough from true to miss the actual interesting part.
What I actually want to write about is a side project of mine, schizo-maxxing, and a specific thing I am doing with it: taking remote viewing, a real practice with a real, documented history, and mapping it into a strict, source-cited knowledge cortex instead of another vague course with no citations behind it. Eventually the same treatment extends to a handful of other practices that sit in the same unfashionable, poorly sourced corner of self-improvement. None of that framing means anything yet without actually knowing what remote viewing is and where it came from, so that is where I want to start.
What remote viewing actually is
Remote viewing is the practice of describing a target, a place, an object, a person, an event, using nothing but a randomly assigned identifier, usually a pair of numbers called a coordinate, with zero other information about what that target is.
No photo, no address, no hint. Someone hands you a coordinate, you sit down, and you write and sketch whatever comes to mind, following a fixed procedure. Afterward, someone compares what you produced against the real target.
This is not a fringe internet claim with no paper trail. It has an actual origin: Stanford Research Institute, the early 1970s, physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, running formal experiments on whether a person could reliably describe a distant, hidden location.
They published in Nature in 1974 and in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1976, which is a genuinely unusual place for this kind of claim to land, and that is exactly why it got the government's attention. The Cold War framing was straightforward and a little grim: if the Soviets might be researching this, the US could not afford to simply assume it did not work and be wrong.
Where the "controlled" part came from
Loose, free-form remote viewing has an obvious problem: there is no way to tell a real signal from imagination, memory, or a viewer subtly steering their own impressions toward what they expect.
Ingo Swann, one of SRI's most consistent early subjects, spent years developing a fix for exactly that problem, a rigid, repeatable protocol called Coordinate Remote Viewing, CRV. The idea was to strip out interpretation as long as possible and force a viewer through a fixed sequence of stages, each one only allowed to produce a specific, constrained kind of data, so that a session could actually be evaluated on its record rather than on the viewer's confidence.
Two disciplines make CRV what it is, and they are the two things I think are worth actually understanding if you want to take any of this seriously as a subject, regardless of what you believe about whether it works. First, double-blind sessions: neither the viewer nor the person monitoring the session in real time knows the target's identity while it is happening. Only a separate person, holding sealed feedback, knows.
Second, the stage structure itself. A session moves through numbered stages in a fixed order, and a viewer is not allowed to skip ahead to describing a whole scene while still in an early stage, even when a strong, specific impression shows up early. That discipline, staying inside a stage's constraints when a stronger impression is trying to jump the queue, is itself part of what is being trained.
Early stages produce short, abstract "gestalts," things like land versus water, motion, structure. Later stages add sensory data (textures, temperatures, sounds), then a rough sketch with dimensional and spatial detail, and the more advanced stages get into more analytical and emotional data that is harder to keep separate from the viewer's own noise. The record produced, not the viewer's gut feeling about how the session went, is what actually gets compared to feedback.
The part that actually ran inside the government for two decades
This is where it stops being a curiosity and becomes an actual, declassified chapter of Cold War history. What started at SRI became a real, funded program that moved through several codenames as it passed between agencies: Grill Flame, then Sun Streak, then Center Lane, then finally Star Gate, run at different points by Army intelligence, DIA, and the CIA, from the early 1970s until it was shut down and declassified in 1995.
Military and intelligence personnel were trained in CRV and tasked with real targets. Joseph McMoneagle, one of the program's first trained viewers (he is usually referred to as viewer "number 001"), later wrote several books about the experience. Others who went through the program, Paul H. Smith, Lyn Buchanan, David Morehouse, wrote their own accounts afterward, and Morehouse's book is generally considered the most explicit public how-to on the actual CRV methodology, stage by stage.
The program did not end with a clean verdict, and I think the honest version of this story has to include that. When it was shut down, the CIA commissioned an outside evaluation from the American Institutes for Research. Statistician Jessica Utts wrote the pro-efficacy analysis, arguing the results showed a real, if unexplained, effect too consistent to dismiss as chance. Psychologist Ray Hyman wrote the skeptical counter-analysis in the same report, arguing methodological problems undermined that conclusion.
Both are sitting in the same official document. Nobody involved got to declare a clean win, and if you read one side without the other you are getting a worse, more confident picture of the evidence than the government's own commissioned reviewers were willing to sign off on. I find that kind of unresolved, on-the-record disagreement far more interesting than either a confident debunking or a confident endorsement, mostly because it is rare to get both sides of a contested claim preserved in one government document instead of scattered across people arguing past each other decades later.
That is the actual, checkable history sitting behind the joke of a project name. Now, the project itself.
What it looks like on the surface
On the surface, schizo-maxxing is a self-paced training app for CRV specifically, the first of several practice domains it is meant to eventually cover. Modules, lessons written in MDX, hands-on exercises, glossary terms that link back to themselves from inside the lesson text.
The first module walks a new user through exactly the two concepts above, what remote viewing is and why the double-blind, staged structure matters, then previews the first three stages before the exercises module has them try an actual "ideogram drill," the standard first hands-on exercise for producing a Stage I gestalt, for real. A glossary term for "viewer" or "monitor" is a small inline component that links straight to its own definition on a shared guide page instead of repeating itself inline every time it comes up.
Perfectly reasonable little course app. If that were the whole thing I would not be writing about it.
What it actually is underneath
The part I actually care about is the content contract underneath the lessons. Every module, lesson, exercise, playlist, and glossary term is a file that has to pass a strict schema before it is allowed to render, no silent failures, a malformed file throws at load time and names itself. That sounds like ordinary engineering hygiene, and it is, but the reason it matters here is what it is in service of.
The plan was never "remote viewing app." The roadmap covers remote viewing, self-hypnosis, sigil and ritual work, synchronicity tracking, meditation, fasting, frequency exposure, all mapped onto the same shared schema: a technique has a name, a category, an evidence tier, a time commitment, concrete steps, a plain-language explanation of why it is supposed to work, and citations back into a source manifest that grades every reference by reliability.
Tier one is declassified government material and genuine public domain text, like the actual DIA CRV training manual and the Utts/Hyman evaluation itself, used in full. Tier two is copyrighted books, the McMoneagle and Morehouse and Swann memoirs among them, summarized and paraphrased by hand from a copy actually owned, never reproduced. Tier three is organizations and training programs, checked against their own terms before anything gets curated from them. Nothing gets in without knowing which tier it came from, which is exactly the same "show your sources, keep both sides of a disagreement" instinct the Utts/Hyman story above is a good example of.
That is the actual product, as far as I am concerned. Not a course. A structured, evidence-graded knowledge base of practices that happen to sit in a weird, unfashionable corner of self-improvement that almost nobody is bothering to source properly.
Everyone building in this space either writes vague inspirational copy with no citations, or reproduces someone else's copyrighted material wholesale and hopes nobody notices. Building the schema first, and refusing to let content in that cannot state where it came from and how confident to be in it, is boring to do and is exactly the kind of boring that becomes hard to copy later.
Why I keep building this same shape of thing
I noticed partway through that this is the third time I have built roughly this pattern. A goal-coaching bot I built keeps a "cortex" of goals, plans, and check-ins as structured data it actually reasons over, not a chat transcript it is guessing from. A DeFi tool I built keeps a graph of protocols and token flows for the same reason, so a pathfinder can search it instead of me hand-reading a dashboard.
This project is the same idea pointed at a completely different domain: a pile of loosely related, individually low-trust practices, turned into one strictly typed structure that a future personalization layer, or an agent, or just a better search page, can actually stand on. The frontend is a rendering of that structure. It is not the structure.
Right now that means one live module out of a much longer roadmap, a schema and a source catalog for everything past it, and a harvesting pass that is still early. The plan is to keep pulling in everything crossable against a real source, declassified documents, owned books, vetted organizations, grade it honestly by tier, and let the cortex grow domain by domain from there. I will share more of it as there is more to actually show.
Where I actually stand on whether any of this is real
I want to close on this honestly, because building a whole knowledge cortex around a subject is not the same as vouching for it. I am not personally convinced remote viewing is real, in the sense of an actual anomalous channel of information rather than cold reading, selective matching, and people being generous with ambiguous sketches after the fact. I do not think anyone should walk away from this post more certain than that.
What keeps me curious instead of dismissive is that the statistical case is not nothing. The Ganzfeld protocol, a sensory-deprivation ESP-testing setup that predates the military program and is independent of it, has a meta-analysis literature, Bem and Honorton's being the best known, reporting hit rates above chance at levels that are hard to wave away as pure noise, even though replication has been inconsistent and the effect size is small enough that methodology arguments dominate the field the same way the Utts and Hyman split dominates the Stargate story. Decades of separately run, controlled experiments out of Princeton's PEAR lab and the Rhine Research Center sit in the same category: real institutions, real controls, results that keep landing just above chance instead of cleanly at it or cleanly disproving it.
That is not proof of anything. It is enough of a statistical anomaly, sustained across independent labs and decades, to make this worth treating as a genuine open question in need of better evidence rather than either a settled parlor trick or a settled truth. That is the actual spirit the cortex is built in: catalog what is really there, tier it honestly by how much it should be trusted, and stay genuinely open to the possibility that somewhere in all of it is something real, without pretending we are already there.