Sunday, January 18, 2026

An anomalous bit of remote viewing

This afternoon I was reading  a brief overview of the development of modern remote viewing in Dean Radin's 2018 book Real Magic -- which included this invitation for readers to try some remote viewing of their own on the fly:

One of [Ingo Swann's] earliest techniques, designed to baffle the analytical mind, was called "coordinate remote viewing," because the only information provided about the target was map coordinates. Without thinking about it or looking at a map, what's your impression of what's located at 37.819732° latitude and -122.478762° longitude?

When I read that, I had a momentary but very clear mental image of an off-white stucco building, on the roof of which was a small domed tower, with a smaller drum and cupola on top of that.

I checked Radin's endnote to see what was at those coordinates: "The Golden Gate Bridge, north of San Francisco, California." Total miss.

Or maybe not? The target was not the bridge itself but a set of coordinates. Could there perhaps be a building very close to the Golden Gate Bridge resembling what I had seen? To check this possibility, I ran an image search for golden gate bridge. The first several images in the search results didn't show any buildings, but the seventh image was this:


The building on the left exactly resembles what I saw in my momentary vision. The plot twist is that that's obviously not the Golden Gate Bridge. It turns out to be a miniature replica which could be seen at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, from 2001 to 2011. The photo is from a site called Yesterland, "a theme park on the Web featuring discontinued Disneyland attractions."

So, given the coordinates of the real Golden Gate Bridge, I remote-viewed the information booth that used to be next to a miniature replica of that bridge some 600 km away from the genuine article? How exactly does that work?

My best guess is that it wasn't remote viewing at all but perhaps precognition of what I would later see when I searched for the Golden Gate Bridge online. Or perhaps it was just our ever-present friend synchronicity -- just a striking coincidence, having nothing to do with any form of extrasensory perception. As discussed in my post "Coincidence and magic," there's no obvious way to distinguish between the two.

As far as I can tell, the information booth is not intended to be a replica of any specific building but rather to evoke San Francisco architecture in a general way.

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