Clairvoyance
Clairvoyance (/klɛərˈvɔɪ.əns/; from French clair 'clear' and voyance 'vision') is the claimed ability to acquire information that would be considered impossible to get through scientifically proven sensations, thus classified as extrasensory perception, or "sixth sense".
A number of Christian saints were said to be able to see or know things that were far removed from their immediate sensory perception as a kind of gift from God, including Charbel Makhlouf, Padre Pio and Anne Catherine Emmerich in Catholicism and Gabriel Urgebadze, Paisios Eznepidis and John Maximovitch in Orthodoxy.
According to Jain text Sarvārthasiddhi, "this kind of knowledge has been called avadhi as it ascertains matter in downward range or knows objects within limits".
[17][18] The earliest record of somnambulist clairvoyance is credited to the Marquis de Puységur, a follower of Franz Mesmer, who in 1784 was treating a local dull-witted peasant named Victor Race.
During treatment, Race reportedly went into a trance and underwent a personality change, becoming fluent and articulate, and giving diagnosis and prescription for his own disease as well as those of others.
The subject was reported to have been successful in a series of 133 trials but the results dropped to chance level when performed before a group of scientists in Cambridge.
[22] Ivor Lloyd Tuckett (1911) and Joseph McCabe (1920) analyzed early cases of clairvoyance and concluded they were best explained by coincidence or fraud.
In 1972, Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ initiated a series of human subject studies to determine whether participants (the viewers or percipients) could reliably identify and accurately describe salient features of remote locations (targets).
[40] The psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Targ and Puthoff's remote viewing experiments at the Stanford Research Institute.
Marks and Kammann discovered that the notes given to the judges in Targ and Puthoff's experiments contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets, or the date of the session at the top of the page.
[44] In 1980, Charles Tart claimed that a rejudging of the transcripts from one of Targ and Puthoff's experiments revealed an above-chance result.
[45] Targ and Puthoff again refused to provide copies of the transcripts, and they were not made available for study until July 1985, when it was discovered they still contained sensory cues.
[46] Marks and Christopher Scott (1986) wrote: "considering the importance for the remote viewing hypothesis of adequate cue removal, Tart's failure to perform this basic task seems beyond comprehension.
As previously concluded, remote viewing has not been demonstrated in the experiments conducted by Puthoff and Targ, only the repeated failure of the investigators to remove sensory cues.
One controlled procedure has invited 'senders' to telepathically transmit one of four visual images to 'receivers' deprived of sensation in a nearby chamber (Bem & Honorton, 1994).
But follow-up studies have (depending on who was summarizing the results) failed to replicate the phenomenon or produced mixed results (Bem & others, 2001; Milton & Wiseman, 2002; Storm, 2000, 2003).One skeptic, magician James Randi, had a longstanding offer of U.S. $1 million—"to anyone who proves a genuine psychic power under proper observing conditions" (Randi, 1999).
French, Australian, and Indian groups have parallel offers of up to 200,000 euros to anyone with demonstrable paranormal abilities (CFI, 2003).
Randi's offer has been publicized for three decades and dozens of people have been tested, sometimes under the scrutiny of an independent panel of judges.
