Knowing When Not to View

Environmental Factors Affecting Remote Viewing

The same research lineage that produced the entropy result also documented an environmental one: free-response anomalous cognition performance degrades measurably during geomagnetic disturbance — see Spottiswoode, Geomagnetic Fluctuations and Free-Response Anomalous Cognition: A New Understanding, Journal of Parapsychology 61.

So we watch the field for you. The system continuously ingests official magnetometer feeds — the planetary index and the readings of the monitoring station nearest to you — and when conditions cross the threshold the research flags, the app tells you before you begin, not after you have spent a session on conditions that had already doomed it.

Corroboration

This is not a fringe reading of the literature. It is what the most experienced remote viewer in the Western record tells people to do.

Joseph McMoneagle learned remote viewing in the U.S. Army as Remote Viewer #001 of the unit that became Project STARGATE, and was awarded the Legion of Merit for his contribution to intelligence operations. He worked the problem operationally for two decades, then as a research subject in the laboratory that ran the science. When he writes about what helps and what does not, he is not repeating something he read.

In Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook (Hampton Roads, 2000) he gives this material a chapter of its own — one section on local sidereal time, the next on geomagnetic disturbance — and he says plainly why they earned the space:

…if they are true and are used correctly, they can have a dramatic effect on the accuracy of remote viewing. — Joseph McMoneagle, Remote Viewing Secrets, p. 167

On the geomagnetic result he reports the confirmation across 2,879 free-response trials measured against the ap index, and then the detail that actually changes how you plan a session: the correlation is not spread evenly around the clock. It concentrates near 13 hours local sidereal time — the same window where accuracy peaks.

…when geomagnetic fluctuations are lowest, they are lowest at the same time the LST shows good remote viewing is assumed to be taking place. — Joseph McMoneagle, Remote Viewing Secrets, p. 172

He also settles an old argument in passing. Earlier studies had contradicted each other on whether geomagnetic activity mattered at all — and he points out that one large study finding almost no correlation had run few of its trials inside that window, while another finding a strong one had, by circumstance, run nearly all of them inside it. The disagreement was never about the effect. It was about when the trials happened.

And he is careful where the evidence runs out, which is exactly why he is worth quoting. Whether our position relative to the galaxy has anything to do with any of it, he says, nobody knows. The correlation is on the record. The cause is not, and he does not pretend otherwise.

He thought both papers important enough to reprint in full at the back of his own book: the sidereal one as Appendix B, and as Appendix C the same geomagnetic paper linked at the top of this page.

The research behind it

These are the studies cited in the geomagnetic paper McMoneagle reprints. We list them because you should be able to check us rather than take our word for it.

Haraldsson, E., & Gissurarson, L. R. (1987). Does geomagnetic activity affect extrasensory perception? Personality and Individual Differences, 8, 745–747.

Nelson, R. D., & Dunne, B. J. (1986). Attempted correlation of engineering anomalies with global geomagnetic activity. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, 509–518.

Persinger, M. A., & Schaut, G. B. (1988). Geomagnetic factors in subjective telepathic, precognitive, and postmortem experiences. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 82, 217–235.

Persinger, M. A., & Krippner, S. (1989). Dream ESP experiments and geomagnetic activity. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 83, 101–116.

Spottiswoode, S. J. P. (1993). Effect of ambient magnetic field fluctuations on performance in a free response anomalous cognition task: A pilot study. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, 143–156.

Spottiswoode, S. J. P. (1997). Apparent association between effect size in free response anomalous cognition experiments and local sidereal time. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 11(2), 109–122.

Tart, C. T. (1988). Geomagnetic effects on GESP: Two studies. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 82, 193–215.