A passage from Wikipedia tells us…
"Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s upon the declassification of certain documents related to the Stargate Project, a US$20 million research program that had started in 1975 and was sponsored by the U.S. government [the C.I.A], in an attempt to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena."
Harold Puthoff & Russell Targ were the directors of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) which was contracted to perform the studies of parapsychological or psi phenomena. “Remote viewing,” otherwise known as “clairvoyance,” was the primary subject of their research.
During the years the project was active, Puthoff and Targ were forbidden to talk about what was going on, or the results of the secret CIA project. However, when the project was finally declassified in the midst of the Clinton administration’s “open government” policies, Harold Puthoff prepared and released a formal statement to the public, in which he speaks of “unequivocal evidence of a human capacity to access events remote in space and time.”
