Wayne Carr, Ph.D. from the "Western Institute of Remote Viewing" has been busy trying to lighten The Amazing James Randiís bank account by a million dollars, and more importantly prove the legitimacy of remote viewing.

James Randi is a skeptic (some call him debunker) who makes his living exposing fraudulent claims of the paranormal.  Everyone who has personally sat down and obtained legitimate data via remote viewing knows that non local awareness is indeed possible. Proving it to someone like James Randi is another matter.

The Randi Challenge sounds simple enough:

"I, James Randi, through the James Randi Educational Foundation, will pay the sum of US$1,000,000 (One Million Dollars) to any person or persons who can demonstrate any psychic, supernatural or paranormal ability of any kind under satisfactory observing conditions."

Doctor Wayne Carr is a clinical psychologist who runs the Western Institute of Remote Viewing, based in Kirkland, Washington.  Carr teaches what he terms "an offshoot" of the original military CRV protocols. (Carr was originally trained in SRV by Dr. Courtney Brown.) Currently Dr. Carr is teaching weekend remote viewing workshops around the country, a Friday night lecture followed by all day classes on Saturday and Sunday.

Carr has been involved in the Randi Challenge for over a year, going through preliminary testing to qualify for the actual million dollar challenge.

Both Carr and the Randi Foundation agreed to allow a statistician from the University of Maryland and Glenn Wheaton, President of the Hawaii Remote Viewersí Guild to assist in the challenge.

Here is how it works. Wayne Carr selected 100 targets to be remote viewed. Glenn Wheaton acts as targeteer; he assigns a target ID to each target and sends only the target ID to Carr.  Carrís viewers work the targets, and then he attempts to match the target to a photo in the pool, ranking them in order. Dr. Carr publishes a ranked list of all targets based on their probability to be the target. The statistician determines if the ranking beats the odds of probability.

Dr. Carr says he has a pool of about 60 viewers, but only about 6 to 10 who regularly work the targets.  Most are graduates of his weekend seminars. Some are natural psychics who use "free form" methods, and a few employ other RV methodology, like TRV or SRV. There are no formal analytical protocols used to assess the data. Carr says he looks through the sessions and uses sort of a "gut feel" to see how the data from sessions matches possible targets in the pool.

The prelims were being conducted regularly over the past year, but then Carr took a break for a few months. He had to attend to his private practice as a psychologist, and he also devoted more time and energy to his RV workshops.

The results so far have been, in Carrís words "disappointing."  The ranking of the targets by remote viewing versus random chance has been "borderline" at best.  Carr is convinced remote viewing is real, but is not sure why his viewers havenít been able to do better in the Randi Challenge.  "It may be because the pool is too large," says Carr. It has been found that when remote viewers work targets from a "pool" of targets, they often tend to gravitate toward another target in the pool that interests them more.  So youíll get a viewer providing good data about the wrong target. There is also what Carr calls "The Skeptic Effect." He feels that Randiís staunch hard line skepticism may in fact effect the outcome of the test.

Was Carr wary of working with such a hard core skeptic?  "Iíve been able to go down to Florida to his foundation and meet with James Randi," Carr says. "And Randi showed his other side. In public he has a very critical almost nasty side. But in person he is different. He has a soft, humble side."

Soft and humble enough to fork over a million dollars to remote viewers?  Time will tell. The final preliminary testing for Carrís viewers should be getting under way early in 2001, and then the actual work for the million dollars will hopefully get underway later this year.