NEWS: Analysis & Commentary A CONVERSATION WITH Jan Pilgenroeder by Dick Allgire Jan is a trained remote viewer who lives in Germany. On Target spoke with Jan recently about his experiences in RV. What got you interested in remote viewing? Some years ago I was zapping through some afternoon talk shows and saw this demonstration of a young man who had taken classes in TRV in the US and claimed that this ability could be learned by anyone. That was the first time I ever heard about RV, and since then I only saw a bit about RV on German TV once. The big media buzz never swept over here. This demonstration was very different from other demonstrations I had seen before. It had none (or at least not as much) of that typical New Age touch to it and it seemed somewhat more believable than the typical claims. I made a mental note to myself to look for "Remote Viewing" on the internet, but it actually took me about half a year to get to that. When I actually looked for it on the internet, I found that all the people who taught RV wanted some insane amounts of money. That really concerned me. I was pretty much a skeptic back then. But I felt the only way I could find if there was something to this RV thing, was trying it myself. But I was not willing (and able) to pay thousands of dollars for this. I downloaded the CRV manual and tried it out. But figured I could not deal with this by myself. I then tried to do some free form, inspired by what I picked up in the manual, and got an amazing hit on the first practice target I tried on one site. On subsequent trials I got nothing. So I wrote it off as coincidence. How did you get involved with The Hawaii Remote Viewers' Guild? Later, I was surfing the links on different RV sites and got to this site that offered RV on-line classes for only $25/month. So I thought "Hey, those people really must believe in RV. At least they are not in this for the money." And they also had some daily chat on IRC. So that gave me the opportunity to see what type of strange people did this RVing. And to my surprise they seemed to be pretty normal and really nice people. We became friends quickly, and they let me on to the on-line training even though they were not prepared to start a new on-line class. What is your occupation? Student. I started out with physics, and then after some years of struggling with differential equations and theoretical electrodynamics I could not take anymore of it and dropped out. Then after my one year duty in the military, I went back to university and started studying sociology with minors philosophy and physics (thank god, no theoretical quantum mechanics for minors, and I got almost all the physics credits covered from my previous attempt at becoming a physicist, so I just had to attend a lecture on experimental quantum physics and do 4 weeks of lab experiments to be done with it, and by then I had already forgot most of it). I am working on my M.A. thesis in sociology now, and hope to be done with being a student in a couple of months. It is really about time. Where in Germany do you live? I live in the city of Aachen in Germany. Aachen is an old city reaching back to Roman times, and Charles the Great was crowned here sometime around 800 A.D. The population is 250k (40k-50k of them are students at either the FH-Aachen or the RWTH, which might explain why Aachen is one of the cities with the most bars and cafes compared to it's population) and since it is quite close (45 minutes by car) to Cologne and the Ruhr-Area (a sprawl of cities, not unlike LA) it is somewhat provincial, which is not really a bad thing. What are some of your interesting remote viewing experiences? You have a session published on the HRVG web site on a Water Wheel in Tunisia. Is that your best session? There were some other sessions I liked much better than the Water Wheel. There was one of my very early sessions (one of my first sessions when I got to PLAYFAIR, I think). The target was Io (one of the Jupiter moons). I really nailed that one, and it was the first time I felt that there really was something to RV, and that I could do it. Unfortunately, I had stuffed 15 galleys on that page in PLAYFAIR and it was not suitable for publication. That was when you where on vacation and Sita took over as my mentor, so you probably did not get to see that sked. The Robert Kennedy assassination session really exited me too. That one was just spooky. I got this man, who was feeling drowsy and falling asleep, even though he felt he had something to do. And then suddenly I knew he was dead. And I got this data of a kitchen and some strange impressions of this kitchen warm and lit, and then cold and damp and abandoned. When I looked up the hotel on the web, it said that the hotel had been abandoned a couple of years ago. The session I did 2 days before 911 really struck me, although I would not want to call it a good experience. I was really scared when I discovered how my data on a boring practice target fit this catastrophic event. If I had been targeted with a cue on a future catastrophic event (instead of some Russian farmers in 1906) and then turned up this data, this would have been the best session I ever did so far. I wish I could get data of that quality more often. But my absolute favorite is our published MJ003 session. It was a pretty boring target and the sessions we did where rather mediocre, but the analysis turned out almost 100% correct. Seeing what a team effort can do to RV is almost as amazing to me as getting a decent session all by myself. Do you find it frustrating to be half a world away from most of your fellow viewers? Fortunately communication over the internet works pretty well most of the time, although it requires much more effort to describe problems in emails than just meeting face to face, or just grabbing the phone and talk. The daily IRC chat really is important to me to stay in touch and keep going. It's not just about getting quick answers, but also about emotional support. I don't think I could have gone through with my on-line training without it. I would still like to build up a network of RVers here in Germany, to do work on targets of common interest. Quite a bit of op-targets worked at HRVG are not of that much interest to people over here. I also wonder if I would do better if I got to RV in German. I can easily shift to think in English, but my German vocabulary is still much bigger, so it might be easier for me to describe different sensations if I would do it in German. Shifting to German during the session when I come to things I am lacking the English vocabulary for does not work for me. It just takes to long to shift back and forth and then I end up with not getting it in either language. Since I am RVing in English all the time, I am not even sure if I could do it in German just like that, without reverting back to English. When I sit down to RV I switch to English without even noticing. I will have to try it sometime. What other interests do you have? One thing related to R; I am on the BOD of Forum Parawissenschaften (short FP), an organization that split off the GWUP (the German CSICOP), because they felt the GWUP is a bunch of pseudo-skeptic disbelievers. And I think the FP is doing things right, not just continuously asking for evidence but also acknowledging it when it comes in instead of doing everything to debunk it if it supports anomalies. So the stance of FP on Psi-research is: "it really seems like we are on to something here, we just don't know for sure what it is yet and need to take a closer look," instead of the pseudo-skeptic "there is nothing to it, and anybody trying to find something is wasting his time." If there was a better chance to make a living in this field, I would really love to get into Psi-research, and with sociology and physics I even have a good background for it (would have to brush up my advanced statistics though). Anything else you would like to say about remote viewing? You don't have to turn up sessions like Joe McMoneagle or Glenn Wheaton to get some useful results. You just need to get together with other RVers, work in teams and do analysis on your sessions. It is amazing what you can get out of a bunch of sessions that look rather disappointing when you look at each one by itself. But when you pool them together and filter out the data they have a lot in common. RVing by yourself can be entertaining every once in a while (while it is frustrating most of the time), but it really gets hot when you work together as a team. In our second MJ003 target (the team voted on not publishing it, so it is not up on our site) the 3 viewers just turned up crappy sessions, and analysis still came up with results that where 50% right. Analysis is done blind to the target, so this was no post-hoc fitting of the data to what should have been expected. The stuff that analysis came up with was just driven by the RV data. Just setting up a team of 4, with 3 viewing and 1 comparing those 3 sessions and picking out the bits of data that where independently produced by at least 2 of the viewers will work wonders on the results. Get together. Team up. Work some interesting targets. Work them blind. Do analysis - also blind. Publish it with all the raw data. It is quite a bit of work - analysis can take about 2-3 hours for just 3 sessions and the scanning and publishing is some really boring routine stuff that will take a couple of hours - but it will be worth it.    PRINT THIS ARTICLE Privacy Statement Copyright © 2002, H.R.V.G. All rights reserved.

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