Records of people experiencing visions go back at least as far as The Bible, when Peter, James and John “saw” a kingdom of God coming to the earth.
The ability to see things with the mind was for many centuries given religious significance, chiefly as messages from God, although clairvoyance has never been solely a Christian phenomenon.
Ancient Hindu religious texts speak of a skill that can be accomplished through personal discipline and meditation.
Apart from the religious aspect, one of the most common reports of clairvoyance is of a loved one appearing just after they have died.
For centuries, clairvoyants learned to keep their experiences quiet for fear of being condemned as a witch and it was only towards the end of the 18th century that the phenomenon was explored scientifically.
The Marquis de Puysegur took inspiration from Franz Mesmer – who theorised that there were forces of energy called animal magnetism. He recorded the personality changes of a peasant he was treating, while he was in a trance, and was reportedly the first to use the term “clairvoyance”.
During the rise in popularity of spiritualists in the late 19th century, many psychics claimed to have the ability to see with the mind.
Early scientific attempts to test the ability, by the likes of chemist Williams Gregory, saw participants asked to identify a concealed image.
It was Duke university psychologist J.B. Rhine who introduced a more standard method of testing, as part of research into extrasensory perception in the early 1930s.
He used a system developed by Karl Zener, where people who claimed to have clairvoyant gifts were asked to identify which one of five cards depicting different symbols had been picked by the tester.
Rhine published a book, Extrasensory Perception, in 1934 detailing his research, which had included a study of Hubert Pearce. With five cards, a subject has a 20 per cent chance of success but Pearce’s average was 40 per cent.
More recently, the Stanford Research Institute coined the term remote viewing and carried out studies into whether people could identify and describe remote locations or targets.
The researchers, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, believed that Uri Geller had psychic abilities and Geller’s skills were showcased on many TV programs. In the past few decades, thousands of experiments have been carried out to test clairvoyance. One study in 1994 recorded a 32 per cent accurate response rate, compared to a chance rate of 25 per cent.
The U.S. government funded a project over more than 20 years to investigate whether clairvoyance could be used to acquire knowledge of enemy operations.
