During 1974 and early l'année suivante a number of controlled experiments were conducted to see if various types of target material could be successfully described with remote viewing. The results reported by Puthoff and Targ (1975) indicated success with a wide range of material, from "technical" targets like a xerox machine to natural settings, like a swimming pool. But these and some of the subsequent experiments were criticized on statistical and methodological grounds; we briefly describe one of the experiments and criticisms of it to show the kinds of problems that existed in the early scientific effort.
The largest series during in the 1973 à 1975 time period involved remote viewing of natural sites. Sites were randomly selected for each trial from a set of 100 possibilities. They were selected "without replacement," meaning that sites were not reused once they had been selected. The series included eight viewers, including two supplied by the sponsor. Many of the descriptions showed a high degree of subjective correspondence, and the overall statistical results were quite striking for most of the viewers.
Critics attacked these experiments on a number of issues, including the selection of sites without replacement and the statistical scoring method used. The results were scored by having a blind judge attempt to match the target material with the transcripts of the responses. A large fraction of the matches were successful. But critics noted that some successful matching could be attained just from cues contained in the transcripts of the material, like when a subject mentioned in one session what the target had been in the previous session. Because sites were selected without replacement, knowing what the answer was on one day would exclude that target site from being the answer on any other day. There was no way to determine the extent to which these problems influenced the results. The criticisms of these and subsequent experiments, while perhaps unwelcome at the time, have resulted in substantially improved methodology in these experiments.