"On the evening of July 19, 1759, a pleasant party was just beginning at [a] home [in]...Goteborg, Sweden. Suddenly...the most eminent of the sixteen guests--the famed scientist and mystic Emmanuel Sweedenborg--left...without explanation. When he returned a short time later, he was pale and shaken. A fire was raging, he said. It had already destroyed a friend's house and now threatened his own.

"The guests exchanged startled glances. As they all know, Sweedenborg did not live in Goteborg, but in Stockholm...[which] was almost three hundred miles away...

"Sweedenborg left the house several more times and returned to report the blaze was still spreading. Finally, at 8:00 p.m., he announced that it had been extinguished--only three houses from his own.

"By the next morning...Sweedenborg's vision was the talk of Goteborg. Had there really been a fire? Or was the seventy-one-year-old's imagination running amok? An apparent answer came the following night when an express messenger arrived from Stockholm with news of a great fire. Three days after the vision, a second messenger brought more details. They matched Sweedenborg's account of the blaze and confirmed that it had halted only three doors from his own and had ended, just as he said, at 8:00 p.m...

"To many parapsychologists, Sweedenborg's reported vision of the Stockholm fire is [a good] example of clairvoyance: the ability to see psychically what the eye cannot perceive." ⁵

Clairvoyance, defined as the acquisition of information about a place, event, or object beyond the range of physical vision and not normally perceptible to the senses, differs from telepathy in that it does not depend upon contact with another person. Clairvoyance is popularly understood as the seeing of internal or external visions, or the sensing of images. The word is derived from the French for 'clear seeing,' and is often referred to as 'second sight.'

According to Eastern tradition, this power is one of the siddhis, or psychic faculties, that can be cultivated by yoga and meditation. Many clairvoyants claim to be using their 'third eye' when visualizing things, and often, this reference is attributed to the pineal gland in the back of the head, which some claim is shaped like an eye.

Some clairvoyants claim to feel physical sensations on the left side of their body during clairvoyant viewing. Some believe this is because clairvoyance concerns the right side of the brain (which is associated with the feminine, creative and intuitive aspects).

An alternate form of clairvoyance, which also seems to be fairly common, is the audio perception of information, termed clairaudience. Perhaps the most famous clairaudient was Saint Joan of Arc, who stated that the voices of Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine spoke to her with messages from God directing her to her destiny. One such message correctly revealed that the sword that she was to use was buried under the altar at the Church of Saint Catherine at Fierbois. ⁵

While several experiments have been designed to test ESP abilities such as clairvoyance in the laboratory, the most popular of these is the remote viewing experiment. (Though here classified under clairvoyance, the remote viewing experiment may also be testing telepathy; such blurred classifications have led parapsychologists to use the term GESP when referring to such phenomena in the laboratory.)

The remote viewing experiment, popularized by Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), consists of an agent or sender traveling to a random location within a half-hour drive from the subject (in most cases located at the SRI). Afterwards, the agent would spend about fifteen minutes viewing the scenery, then head back to the SRI. Meanwhile, the subject, placed in an electrically shielded room, would attempt to view the location and call out the images that he or she sees as they came to mind. The experimenter is generally with the subject, recording his descriptions.

One example of a remote viewing experiment involved Hal Puthoff as the agent and former police commissioner Pat Price as the subject. Price reported seeing "a little boat jetty or dock along the bay...little boats, some motor launches...some little sailing ships...a Chinese or Japanese pagoda effect...it's a definite feeling of Oriental architecture." The target location was the Redwood City Mariana, "a small harbor for local boating enthusiasts." What Puthoff had been looking at were "neat rows of small sailboats...[and] the mariana's restaurant, a curious building with a stepped roof that gave it an Oriental appearance." The experiment was a striking success. ²

One variation of the traditional remote viewing experiment combines its elements with those of the ganzfeld and eliminates the need for an agent or sender. In this type of experiment, a person who is not directly associated with the experiment randomly selects a picture from a group of several hundred. This picture becomes the target image, and is set aside in a remote location. The subject then attempts to sketch or describe the target image. This procedure is typically repeated seven times, each time with a different target image.

In order to determine if the experiment was successful, the descriptions given by the subject and the target images are randomly shuffled and handed over to an independent judge. The judge is told to rank or match the correct images with the subject's descriptions. If clairvoyant ability was present, the judge should be able to correctly match the majority of the descriptions to the target images.

Another type of remote viewing experiment (which the military has showed some interest in) involves the ability to clairvoyantly view any location in the world, given its coordinates.

One experiment that involved the well-known psychic Ingo Swann had some very interesting results. Swann was given the coordinates (selected by a skeptical scientist outside of the SRI) for an island in the Indian Ocean, and he proceeded to describe in considerable detail "the layout of the buildings and what appeared to be equipment of a joint French-Soviet meteorological research installation...he even drew a passable map of the island." It was later verified that his description was accurate in every detail, and that the target location was the French-administered island of Kerguelen. ²

A meta-analysis of the several thousand trials conducted by various independent researchers over the past 25 years in remote viewing indicates that information can be perceived from remote locations and establishes that clairvoyance, as opposed to chance, is the likeliest possibility.

So what do all of these experiments indicate about clairvoyance? While all of the information is far from uncovered, parapsychologists have discovered a few curious traits of this phenomena.

For example, the remote viewing experiments seem to indicate that certain "left-hemispheric" functions, such as reading words or numbers, is extremely difficult to do psychically. On the other hand, "right-hemispheric" functions, such as discerning shapes, forms, textures, and colors, were described quite accurately. ⁶ This once again hints at the possibility that clairvoyance is a right-brained function.

Other remote viewing experiments suggest a slow rate of transmission of information. For instance, in some remote viewing trials, the location was near a railroad track, often with a train passing by. The subjects, while able to describe much of the area, did not include the train in their report. This implies a limited rate of information transfer. ⁴

While such aspects of remote viewing as letters, numbers, and movement have been difficult to perceive, one series of SRI experiments indicated that size was not an issue. The results of these experiments revealed that objects even 1/16 of an inch in size (in come cases even 1/100 of an inch in size) can be detected. ⁴

Other SRI remote viewing experiments were conducted to test certain theories regarding the functioning of ESP. For example, to test the theory that ESP information is communicated through radio waves, the SRI conducted a series of experiments with the subject inside of a metal chamber shielding out radio waves. The results of these experiments were as good as any other, indicating that radio waves could not be involved in any aspect of ESP.