On Courtney Brown’s “Farsight Planet 2014: Great Pyramid of Giza”

On 3/14/14 remote viewer Courtney Brown launched his new project “The Great Pyramid of Giza: The Mystery solved”. He hyped the launch for about 6 weeks on his FaceBook page, with frequent postings of “implications” 1. On Jan 22 on his Facebook page, Courtney characterized the announcement:

“Something important is going to happen sometime next month, February 2014. Nothing can stop it now. There will be an announcement, and the world will change on the date of that announcement. Part of that announcement will happen on this Facebook page, right here. In the beginning, only a few will understand the significance of the announcement, and what it means for all of humanity currently living on this planet. Some will laugh, and some will cry. But in time, the world will come to know that life on Earth changed significantly on that day in February 2014. A mystery that has confused our civilization for thousands of years will find an answer. And from that answer, a new direction for the future growth of our species will arise.”

Wow. The world changed forever. I don’t think I’d be mischaracterizing Courtney’s tone and scope of his announcement as being of prophetic proportions. I was not surprised on March 15 when I checked out his project and found he failed to deliver on that promise, though not for lack of trying. The interesting work of Daz Smith and Dick Allgire is marred by Courtney’s flawed analysis, inability to cite possible confounding factors, and unscientific rhetoric (see his YouTube video); the certainty of his analysis is unfounded.

Courtney’s lists of possible methodological flaws in his own projects are too short (his list of flaws for his current project is non-existent). For instance: his 2012 Farsight Climate Project2.  Courtney’s project prediction (emphasis mine): “the remote viewing perceptions for 1 June 2013 … seem to suggest… [tragedies]…  across many of the above geographical locations [will occur] by mid-2013“. None of the predicted tragedies came to pass at those locations by mid-2013.

I see a couple of potential confounding factors. Courtney notes they “have been keeping track of news stories3 that suggest possible feedback for this project”, yet collected stories fall outside of target parameters (different locations, after mid-2013). Feedback parameters that do not match stated targets (dates/locations) could have polluted sessions.

In remote viewing, there is a well known phenomenon where viewers working together can all be wrong in the same way, as if they are psychically feeding off of each others’ incorrect impressions (feeding off of one’s own incorrect impressions in RV is known as ‘castle-building’, so this could be called group castle-building— it would not be unreasonable to suspect subconscious Mayan calendar fears could have polluted the entire group of 2013 targets). Despite the fact that this phenomenon is well known amongst remote viewers, it is a possibility Courtney did not publicly cite, instead suggesting that the sessions may have viewed a slightly different timeline. It is polite that he prefers to blame time itself for the bad data rather than the participants, but it is poor science to fail to exhaustively consider possible methodological flaws.

His video is peppered with unscientific, unsupportable, absolutist rhetoric like, “there can be no doubt”, “unambiguous”, “impossible”, “obvious”, “it may be the most important announcement that anyone has ever made”, “the most mysterious puzzle in human history has been resolved”, “the quality of the remote viewing data obtained by Dick Allgire and Daz Smith is equal to that which would have been obtained if they were physically present at the time when the pyramids were being constructed”; and that’s just in the first 15 minutes! Let’s address the first one, “there can be no doubt”. Of course there can be doubt! Without feedback there is no way to know if shared common results aren’t group castle-building. It’s not scientific to tell the reader how to think, it is scientific to convince the reader through a solid logical argument supported by the data.

To Courtney: instead of insisting that there can be no objections and preemptively characterizing any and all objections as merely “noise” (intellectual peer pressure), you would do better to consider and present all of the possible objections yourself, before your detractors claim them, demonstrating that you are willing and able to leave no stone unturned —so to speak— in the matter, rather than just turning over the stones that you fancy.

We have so far established that psychic group-think is a possible confounding factor. It only takes one person who has an emotional attachment to a particular outcome to (subconsciously) spoil everyone’s session data. How has Courtney controlled against psychic pollution of session data (a.k.a. telepathic overlay)? He doesn’t say, because (to my knowledge) no such control exists. Given confounding factors, feedback is the only way to validate session results. Without feedback, certainty posturing is unfounded. I asked remote viewer and project participant Daz Smith if a viewer can tell the difference between a lie and the truth, even when the tasker can’t:

“No they can’t. I was a participant in a hrvg project where the true target was hidden behind a mask and the mask target was one that only existed within imagination yet all the viewers described it as a real target.” 

This answer strongly suggests that if the tasker expects/hopes/wishes the viewers to find a particular result, that the expectation could pollute the session. So, if the tasker believes aliens made the pyramids—regardless of the truth of the matter— the viewers might perceive aliens building the pyramids. Viewers Dick Allgire and Daz Smith have admirable track records viewing aspects of targets for which they receive feedback. Their track record, though, is not 100% (nor is anyone’s)— see the climate project mentioned earlier; they did receive feedback on those sessions (by virtue of still being alive through 2013) and were still wrong. What is their track record (or any viewer’s, for that matter) for viewing aspects of targets for which they never receive feedback? This is a matter that I don’t believe the remote viewing community has settled, and must be settled before weighing the credibility of any session data for which there can never be any feedback.

Perhaps Courtney feels that the presence of feedback makes no difference in accuracy. If this is so, then he should be eager to put the matter to rest with a series of trials designed to prove just that. Faulty analysis is easy when there is no feedback, since ideograms are by their very nature incomplete. When Daz described something ‘like sound’ moving a stone, how do we know the degree to which that is literal vs. symbolic? I did an RV session recently (facilitated by Daz) in which I had very strong impressions of energy pulses radiating away from an object. Turns out the “energy pulses” were the tides! Without feedback, what was to stop me from (erroneously) interpreting them as ‘aliens!’?

Courtney acknowledges in the video, “this is not to say we know everything there is to know about remote viewing”, yet he flaunts this project as if these sessions and his analysis of them must be perfect.

Haste to certainty is unscientific. I am an RVer myself. You can see my lengthy article on the subject here. So I understand RV concepts and acknowledge their validity. I look forward to the day when RV has reached mass acceptance; I see awareness of this aspect of consciousness as a crucial next step in the growth of humanity. My criticism is not of RV in general. From that perspective I am an ally to Courtney and I hope he regards my comments as they are intended: a friendly critique.

My criticism is his hasty, unfounded conclusions (the hallmark of both pseudo-scientific and pseudo-skeptical thinking); his failure to cite and counter possible confounding factors; his use of absolutes like “no doubt” and “impossible”— intellectual peer pressure, meant to convey that only the ignorant would take issue with him. My objections to his analysis are valid; his claim of “no doubt” is not.

Do I think, like Courtney, that widespread acceptance of the phenomena that makes RV possible can change the world? Absolutely! Do I think that Courtney presented this project with sufficient rigor, dispassion and clarity in a way that could, or would, or should increase acceptance of RV? Do these sessions constitute unambiguous, undeniable proof of ‘ET’ contributions to the pyramids?  No and no.

The way for RV to change the world is for the leading edge of the field to improve their methodologies and settle uncertainties such as those outlined above. The way to change the world is through the unfinished hard work of improving the field; Courtney gets too far ahead of the field! He needs to concern himself with settling these matters before tackling who built the pyramids.

False Advertising is a Crime

Courtney: “The quality of the remote viewing data obtained by Dick Allgire and Daz Smith is equal to that which would have been obtained if they were physically present at the time when the pyramids were being constructed”. Let’s parse that statement. Had Courtney said “…some of the remote viewing data…” he’d be in the clear, but he said “the remote viewing data”, which means all of the data. The word “the” is the qualifier. If he wanted to refer to some number of data other than all, he would have had to replace the word “the” with another qualifier: some, one, that, many, most, etc. It takes just one black swan to disprove the statement ‘the swans in the pond are white’. So too, it takes just one bit of data that is not as good as what they would have obtained if they were physically present to disprove Courtney’s statement. But for the sake of argument I’ll discuss a few:10314773_10152425128774903_2803138782718224500_nA high quality drawing by Daz; this is some excellent remote viewing. With just a target ID, Daz correctly drew a pyramidal structure, and even people for scale. Ancient. Sandy. Right on the money. To dismiss this as confirmation bias would be folly. But Courtney set a higher threshold than merely good, or even great. His threshold is that the data is as good as if Daz were physically there. So what of the word: “broken”? If Daz were “physically present at the time when the pyramids were being constructed” would he have characterized the thing depicted in his drawing as ‘broken’ or ‘under construction’? RVers can understand why he would have used a word that is so similar in intent but just enough off to miss it importantly. But perhaps something really was broken. If so, what? Were Daz “physically present at the time when the pyramids were being constructed”, I bet he would have clarified that word. But this is RV, and RV is not the same as being physically present, and so misses details that he otherwise would have jotted down.  RV cannot (readily) pick up alpha-numerics. How can we be sure Daz didn’t miss important signage?

Above is a drawing by Dick. Do you think Dick would have drawn this were he there? Of course, there is no way to know for sure, but I don’t think ancient Egypt had residential districts with apartment high rises with windows. Dick has a number of ‘low resolution’ images. Maybe he’s just a scrappy, scribbly, uncertain kind of artist, and were he there that is what he would have produced. But I’d be willing to bet that if I sat Dick down in front of an actual residential district today, his drawing would contain more detail and certainty than that. mantisAnother drawing by Dick. Would he have really described “preying mantis beings” were he there? Did he see an alien? Or— just as Daz’s ‘broken’ hampered a perception that might have more accurately been described as ‘under-construction’— could this be instead an almost-correct depiction of any number of animal-faced ancient Egyptian deities? Or a child’s game? Or a piece of jewelry? Or telepathic overlay? Was this a case of rubber banding (giving undo prominence to an item of interest)? None of us can be sure, because 1) there is no feedback to confirm this drawing and 2) RV is not as good as the five senses!

Let’s set those objections aside for a minute. Let’s assume Dick really did perceive “preying mantis beings”. Back to Courtney’s claim, “The quality of the remote viewing data obtained by Dick Allgire and Daz Smith is equal to that which would have been obtained if they were physically present at the time when the pyramids were being constructed”; is this the best drawing Dick could produce were he physically present? Was the alien merely a bust? Was the rest of his body obscured? By what? Did he really have an opening at the top of his head? Did his eyes have no detail? His mouth parts?

Courtney’s claim is more than unsupportable, it’s demonstrably false. I’m not sure which is worse: that such false statements are criminal, or that they are grossly unscientific?

So Courtney needs to learn to tighten up his rhetoric, and temper his passion for remote viewing with healthy skepticism of his own analyses. And there is still another, deeper lesson for him in his own project: From Courtney’s implications posting #4: “those who govern seek to control what the masses accept as true… [and]… brazenly manipulate knowledge”. There are two key (and apt) concepts here:

  1. people often attempt to control others’ beliefs (I agree).
  2. willful manipulation is the primary problem (I disagree).

People can also attempt to manipulate others’ beliefs unwittingly. Courtney is attempting to control the beliefs of others (he does not realize the manipulation of his own rhetoric) by handing us the conclusions we must draw (because he says so), rather than presenting the data and letting us arrive at our own conclusions. Courtney exhibits the behaviors he rails against. That is projection.

To Courtney: I invite you to consider how your eagerness to persuade leads you astray from your search for knowledge. You cannot hold it against someone else for exhibiting behavior you yourself exhibit. Using old guard tactics to start a revolution is no revolution at all, it is a changing of the guards. Many people are watching you; with that power comes responsibility. Fix yourself first, that you may lead by example!


“A virtual accomplice to suicide”

Hopefully, Courtney’s most disastrous failure is Hale-Bopp, a session broadcast on national radio so egregious that Alex Heard, writing for the New York Times, described Courtney as, “a scam artist, ‘definitely deluded’ and a virtual accomplice to suicide.”4

In 1996, Courtney was interview by Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM. He claimed his team had remote viewed an alien craft near Hale Bopp, and predicted imminent mass ET flyovers. The photo alleging to show the craft for which the remote viewing sessions were made has since been deemed fraudulent.

As part of the fallout from the Hale Bopp fiasco, fellow RVer and former Farsight employee Prudence Calabrese confessed to participating— with Courtney— in  “nothing less than the manipulation of the public’s mind, not by outright lying, but by the selective representation, improper analysis, and overblown presentation style of remote viewing data.”  5

File Drawer Effect

Courtney uses the File Drawer Effect6 to hide his failures.

Courtney has a habit of expunging fails from his web site. He’s taken down his embarrassingly narcissistic Giza “implications”, his 0% accurate 2012 Farsight Climate Project, and his list of 2012 climate news stories, which might have led an uncritical viewer to believe his 2012 project was a success, but upon closer inspection, none of his collected news stories had anything to do with any of the sites his project targetted, and they also fell outside of the targetted time range. Bad feedback can pollute sessions.

Fraud

In 2019, Courtney posted a video of an RV session where an offscreen assistant could clearly be heard prompting the RVer. Despite this, Courtney insists his sessions are not re-enactments; he even pinned a bullshit justification to the youtube video.

Tax Fraud Too?

Farsight.org has always claimed (as of the time of this writing, 12/20/19) to be a non-profit, yet none of their sales goes to the non-profit entity, Farsight Research, Inc. Instead, sales to go the for-profit entity, Farsight, Inc. This is a violation of Farsight Research, Inc’s 501(c)(3) status, and has been the case for at least 20 years.

Angry? Do you think Courtney should be held accountable for engaging in tax fraud? The IRS makes it simple to report:

Just fill out IRS Tax Fraud form 13909 against Farsight Research, Inc., and under question three, select the second checkbox: “Organization is engaged in commercial, for-profit business activities.” To remain anonymous, check the checkbox that reads, “I am concerned that I might face retaliation or retribution if my identity is disclosed.”


Regarding Courtney’s File Drawer, these are just the one’s I’m aware of. How many more are there? Other than Courtney, who can say? If you know of other fails Courtney is hiding, let me know.


As of 2019, Daz Smith and Dick Allgire are no longer affiliated with Farsight.

A 2023 NH Literary Awards Finalist for Outstanding Work of Young Adult Fiction, you can pick up Dan Pouliot’s debut novel, Super Human, hardcover edition for just $17.95 for a limited time. Learn more…

  1. Courtney has since removed this page from his site. Backup courtesy of archive.org[]
  2. Courtney has taken down this page. Backup courtesy Archive.org[]
  3. Courtney has since taken down this page. Backup courtesy Archive.org[]
  4. Waaay Out, New York Times[]
  5.  Former Farsight RVer Cites “Bad Science, Bad Judgment”[]
  6. “‘The File Drawer Effect’ which refers to the practice of tucking away negative/neutral/statistically non-significant research findings into ‘file drawers’ making these results inaccessible and hidden from reviewers.” The file drawer effect: A call for meticulous methodology and tolerance for non-significant results[]

9 comments

  1. I agree, C.Brown is a charlatan.
    Now he destroyed any hope about RV.
    He is acting like a politician, censor and kid.
    “You don’t buy me DVD’s? then f* you, i stop the announcements.
    C.Brown..your killed your “job”, carier and person thanks to your EGO.
    Mr dpouliot, you really think this can help to the people?.

    1. I would not support calling him names. He is passionate about remote viewing; he allows his passion to hinder his impartial judgement.
      While I think Courtney’s Giza project is merely 1 RV project with no feedback to verify, I do believe that remote viewing in general can help people.
      If you haven’t already, you may want to check out my article on RV. http://danpouliot.com/2012/07/remote-viewing/
      Remote viewing is still in its infancy. That is exciting to me, as it means we have lots to learn! In that article you can see one of my experiments in to predicting the shape of stock charts, with compelling results!

  2. Thank you so much, Dan, for this commentary on Courtney’s remote viewing project! I don’t know a lot about RV so your understanding of the field helps me when viewing the video. I certainly agree that due to so many uncertainties within the RV field, the most that can be derived from the results is “food for thought”… discussing in group forums what the possible implications of the results could be. Nothing can be concluded only speculated regarding the results. But this is still good… we need to ask questions about our past and our connection to other Sentient Beings, not of this Earth.

  3. Wonderfully put! Well, at least something good came of my following Courtney’s announcements almost daily; I too fell a bit for the hype but he’s done this before and it’s getting old. I’d much rather read your carefully thought out and rational discussions of RVing than Courtney’s self serving and somehow grandiose pronouncements. He really should have known better by now. (Couldn’t the negative reaction have been foreseen? 🙂
    Thanks, I’ll be reading the rest of your posts now…

  4. Dan,
    First I want to go back to your analysis of Courtney climate change project data because I fear you are doing the same thing as Courtney may be doing by miss analyzing the rv data and what has been said. For the climate change project Courtney nor anyone involved said the things that were going to happen would happen as per the rv sessions to the exact locations used as targets. The targets chosen gave a general cross picture of most of the planet from Australia to America.
    You said: “None of the predicted tragedies came to pass at their target locations.” They did because the prediction was not for any set location but for a general coverage of all the target locations together – the targets grouped as a whole and a description of what would happen as a whole. There was no list of predictions of exactly what would happen where – but a general summary, as so:
    “the remote viewing perceptions for 1 June 2013 appear much different, and they seem to suggest the following types of physical changes across many of the above geographical locations by mid-2013:
    – Impacts from what appear to be large meteors leading to tsunamis and possible volcanism
    – Extensive and forceful flooding of coastal areas
    – Excessive solar radiation
    – Storms and other severe weather
    In terms of the effects of these changes on humans, these data also suggest:
    – Massive self-organized relocation from coastal areas (refugees)
    – The breakdown of rescue or other notable governmental functioning
    – The breakdown of the food supply system
    – The breakdown of the vehicular transport system
    – Extensive loss of buildings near coasts

    Now, if you take all the target locations a bit like meta data, as a group/whole and the predicted activity for this area. I’m sorry but I believe that we accurately, years in advance, predicted (quite – not fully) an accurate picture of the increased climate change – feedback for this can be found here: http://www.climatechange2013.com/news/
    We had a meteor impact – (OK, as per most analsysed rv sessions the amplitude was too high in Courtney’s prediction)
    Across the globe we had extensive flooding of coastal areas
    We had severs storms and weather – look at the news feedback to prove this.
    No to this new project. YES I agree the marketing speak used words that should IMO never be used with ANY Rv projects – words like ‘PROVED’ and ‘SOLVED’. I agree mistakes have been made here.
    Now move the marketing aside and look at the data – all done under double blind conditions.
    Both I and the other viewer describe on camera and on paper a man made large pyramid type structure made of blocks, moved in part by a slave/master type relationship in the past.
    The target turned out to be the pyramid construction – so most or quite a bit of the RV data CAN be verified against common knowledge – correct?
    Ok, so this leaves the data that cant yet be verified – the unknowns. In the case of my RV sessions this is mainly the movement of the blocks, which I felt was by an advanced tech using some kind of sound/energy to ‘help’ move the blocks easier. Now, YES I totally agree that this part cannot yet be verified, but at the sametime it does fit in to some of the theories put forwards as potentials at this time. But yes I agree its not proved. solved in any way.
    So lets move on to the other inflammatory data ‘aliens’. I can only vouch for my RV of which I did get an advanced outside race that I call’ travellers’ who travelled a vast distance in ships and who brought knowledge and tech and tho then interacted and changed the society of the pyramid builders. Were these ET/aliens – well thats debatable based on my rv Data – but certainly not proved – again though it does fit with some of the more outlandish theories put forward and as viable as any other theory until science shows us the actual truth.
    So, if you can put aside the marketing talk, and look at the rv session data piece by piece – you will clearly see a high comparison of valid data with the blind target of the pyramid, leaving some elements, that YES, I agree cannot at this time be assessed for full accuracy (method construction & who helped).
    All I’m saying is dont throw the baby away with bath water here – there is good, valid in protocol RV data here.
    Ok now to tasker overlay -could this have been a factor – absolutely as it can in every single rv project we all do. BUT just because it is possible it densest mean that this is what happened, maybe the rv data is real and not influenced by any overlay from Courtney. Maybe the data is influenced by overlay form me – after all I have knowledge of the pyramids, Ive studies them, been inside them, read books, articles seen films, know the theories both for classical building techniques and the theories for more advanced things like aliens and levitation – could overlay or knowledge have come form me – maybe – we just dont know because RV is so young a tool. BUT again, just because it could have come form my pre obtained knowledge – it doesnt mean it did.
    All I’m saying is, put aside your distaste for the way it was marketed, and the way its presented, look at the freely available raw data, analyse for yourself – were we on target, then analyse for yourself dont take anyone elses word for it – we all see different things within every rV session – ive never seen any two people analyse a session the same way and see the same things – you should know this.

    1. Daz,
      Thank you for your kind, considerate, thoughtful and measured reply. I will have to look again at the 2012 climate project to see if I agree with your assessment, though I am a bit skeptical that targets were selected that —if I understand you correctly— should not be considered targets per se. That was not made clear to me (or perhaps it was, and I missed it). Again, I will re-assess, but if really you were targetting ‘just anywhere’, then couldn’t you argue that there would be no such thing as a wrong result, since you will always find *somewhere* that will match any given result? If the Key West target shows people with no technology, using crude tools, and you find someone somewhere using crude tools in 2012, to me that seems like too low a threshold to stand up to scientific rigor.
      As to your Giza project, I agree 100%. My issue is not with your or Dick’s sessions, my issue is with Courtney’s unfounded characterization of them. In honesty, his characterization was so irritatingly unscientifict that I had to turn it off; I never got past minute 15. I agree that your results may in fact be accurate. I agree that you clearly gained solid site contact. You and I seem to agree that telepathic overlay or some other pollution cannot be ruled out. So take the results with a grain of salt, not as proof. I will have a deep look at your sessions at my earliest convenience!

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