According to Puthoff and Targ (1975) the scientific research endeavor at SRI may never have been supported had it not been for three apparent operational successes in the early days of the program. These are detailed by Puthoff and Targ (1975), although the level of the matches is not clearly delineated.
One of the apparent successes concerned the "West Virginia Site" in which two remote viewers purportedly identified an underground secret facility. One of them apparently named codewords and personnel in this facility accurately enough that it set off a security investigation to determine how that information could have been leaked. Based only on the coordinates of the site, the viewer first described the above ground terrain, then proceeded to describe details of the hidden underground site.
The same viewer then claimed that he could describe a similar Communist Bloc site and proceeded to do so for a site in the Urals. According to Puthoff and Targ "the two reports for the West Virginia Site, and the report for the Urals Site were verified by personnel in the sponsor organization as being substantially correct (p. 8)."
The third reported operational success concerned an accurate description of a large crane and other information at a site in Semipalatinsk, USSR. Again the viewer was provided with only the geographic coordinates of the site and was asked to describe what was there.
Although some of the information in these examples was verified to be highly accurate, the evaluation of
operational work remains difficult, in part because there is no chance baseline for comparison (as there is in
controlled experiments) and in part because of differing expectations of different evaluators. For example, a
government official who reviewed the Semipalatinsk work concluded that there was no way the remote viewer could have
drawn the large gantry crane unless he actually saw it through remote viewing, or he was informed of what to draw
by someone knowledgeable of [the site].
Yet that same analyst concluded that the remote viewing of [the site]
by subject S1 proved to be unsuccessful
because the only positive evidence of the rail-mounted gantry crane
was far outweighed by the large amount of negative evidence noted in the body of this analysis
. In other words,
the analyst had the expectation that in order to be "successful" a remote viewing should contain accurate information
only.
Another problem with evaluating this operational work is that there is no way to know with certainty that the subject did not speak with someone who had knowledge of the site, however unlikely that possibility may appear. Finally, we do not know to what degree the results in the reports were selectively chosen because they were correct. These problems can all be avoided with well designed controlled experiments.