Remote viewing sounds like intelligence-agency folklore – yet it is one of the best-documented parascientific methods of the 20th century. On the German-language podcast {ungeskriptet} by Ben, Austrian clairvoyant Birgit Fischer describes her work as a remote viewer from 1:21:20 onwards, drawing a line from the CIA programme of the 1970s to present-day missing-person cases. This article looks at what remote viewing actually is, what Fischer reports, and where the method sits between science and mediumship.
What is remote viewing?
Remote viewing is the ability to describe impressions of places, persons or events to which one has no sensory access. The term traces back to American artist and parapsychologist Ingo Swann in the early 1970s. From 1972 onwards, physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) tested whether such perception could be reproduced under controlled conditions. The experiments grew into a covert research and operational programme of the US government, jointly funded by the CIA, DIA, Army Intelligence and NSA – today known as the Stargate Program.
For more than two decades, trained viewers such as Joe McMoneagle, Pat Price and Ingo Swann himself worked on real-world targets: locations of Soviet installations, the condition of kidnapping victims, the whereabouts of fugitives. In 1995 the CIA had the programme reviewed externally by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). The report remains contested: statistician Jessica Utts concluded that the observed effects were statistically real and replicated; psychologist Ray Hyman acknowledged significant anomalies but did not consider conventional explanations ruled out. The programme was discontinued – but the methodology survived in civilian training structures and is today publicly accessible through thousands of pages of declassified CIA records.
What Birgit Fischer says in the podcast
In her conversation with Ben, Fischer divides her work into three areas: personal readings on life questions, afterlife contact and remote viewing. The third she describes as a location-independent „sensing into" situations, persons or sites.
Find Me Group: outsourced, vetted, working for agencies
Her access to missing-person cases, she says, runs through an organisation led by a former US police officer – Fischer calls it the Find Me Group. The Find Me Group does in fact exist: it was founded by Kelly Snyder, a retired US federal investigator, and connects remote viewers and mediums with law-enforcement agencies and families searching for missing persons.
According to Fischer, the organisation still works for the CIA today – with such assignments effectively outsourced. Officially the CIA discontinued the Stargate program in 1995. What Fischer describes would therefore amount to a civilian continuation outside formal agency structures.
Anyone who wants to work for the Find Me Group, Fischer says, is vetted in advance. She herself worked unpaid – while the organisation charges its clients „a lot of money". The business model is therefore clear: the organisation earns its income from paying clients, the viewers work pro bono.
Multi-viewer protocol: only convergence is passed on
The protocol Fischer describes is standard practice in the remote-viewing field: several viewers work the same case independently of each other, without consulting. Only afterwards are the reports compared. Whatever overlaps between them is forwarded to clients; what is unique to a single viewer's perception is filtered out. The noise of any single viewer is checked against the convergence of several.
What this means in practice: the organisation – not the individual viewer – decides what eventually reaches the client. Viewers do not see each other's reports and usually do not learn what becomes of their own impressions either.
The case where Fischer stopped
In a case involving missing children, Fischer says she perceived abused children on a ship during remote viewing – so vividly that it felt as if she had been there herself. She passed this perception on to the Find Me Group.
The organisation did not forward the information. Why, was not transparent to Fischer – from her perspective the lead simply seemed to meet with no interest. For her this was a limit: if such serious accounts ultimately attract no follow-up, she could not in good conscience continue the work. She decided to stop working for the organisation.
Added to this is the emotional weight. Such perceptions, Fischer says, threw her badly off balance. Other mediums working with police describe the same – including Pascal Voggenhuber: such perceptions are not abstract, but emotionally and physically present. She had taken on this work, she says, because she could „do a lot of good" with it. But after this case it was over for her at this place.
You can watch the relevant podcast excerpt embedded on the Heaven Connect knowledge page – starting directly at 1:21:20.
Remote viewing and mediumship – what is the difference?
Both are forms of non-local perception – perception beyond what the five senses allow. But their focus differs:
- Remote viewing targets places, objects or events. It is irrelevant whether a target person is alive or deceased. The method was developed specifically for intelligence work and is heavily protocol-driven (targets, blind sessions, defined phases).
- Mediumship is contact with the deceased. It has its own tradition – spiritualist, dating from the mid-19th century – and follows different perceptual patterns (evidence that is plausible only to the bereaved; connection through energy and relationship rather than location).
That Birgit Fischer practises both is fairly unusual. In the US Stargate context, remote viewing was deliberately framed as a methodologically clean, „scientific" discipline – kept separate from spiritual mediumship to maintain acceptance within the military apparatus. In Europe, where the institutional separation is weaker, the two more often blend.
What can be said responsibly about remote viewing?
- Remote viewing exists as a systematically trained practice – this is documented in thousands of pages of declassified CIA records (publicly available in the CIA Reading Room).
- The effects were statistically demonstrable in controlled studies, but their practical reliability for individual operational tasks was limited – which is precisely what stood at the end of Stargate.
- Today, civilian structures such as the Find Me Group and the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA) work on concrete cases – mostly missing-person searches, occasionally also in criminal proceedings.
- Anyone calling themselves a remote viewer today is not automatically vetted. There are reputable training lineages (Lyn Buchanan, Ed Dames, Paul H. Smith) – and a great deal of bluster around them. As everywhere in this field, it pays to scrutinise the biographies and track records of individual viewers.
What does this mean for Heaven Connect?
Birgit Fischer's account fits the same picture as our article Mediums in police work: mediumistic perception – whether as remote viewing, afterlife contact or energetic crime-scene reading – is not just a private offering of comfort, but is also used operationally in several countries. That authorities, with tight budgets and a bias for measurable results, repeatedly turn to it is the clearest practical answer to the question of whether such methods work: they would not be commissioned if nothing came of it.
Heaven Connect lists only mediums who speak transparently about their work. We do not rate remote viewing or classical mediumship as the „better" technique – both are forms of perception with their own strengths, their own limits and their own areas of application. What unites them: they take seriously the claim that human perception reaches further than our mainstream scientific model assumes.
→ Continue reading: Mediums in police work – Voggenhuber, Croiset & the Etta Smith case